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Next Year, Italian Opera [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-10
By David Glenn Cox
Another NFL season is in the books. The Super Bowl was over almost before it started. The star players of the game were the Philadelphia coaches and defense. At one point, Patrick Mahomes was 0 -5 and befuddled with an interception. He’s too good of a quarterback to look that bad if Kansas City wasn’t being out-thought on the sidelines. Three and out, three an out, three and out. That’s too good a Kansas City team to be treated like that.
I want to commend the NFL and (gulp) Fox for streaming the big Game on Tubi. I’ve wondered for years why networks didn’t get a YouTube Channel and stream. See BS is trying with its Paramount service (pay service) Cut the affiliates out altogether, their worst fears realized, being abandoned!
Share the revenue with the affiliates and consider it promotion. But there is the pervasive argument left over from 1985. Network affiliates worry if networks stream, no one will watch the network affiliates anymore. So premier events were blocked even though tens of thousands if not millions, would be otherwise watching.
It's kind of the same argument the gas light company had. If you let Mr. Edison string up his electric lights everywhere no one will want the gas light company anymore. It’s not just coming, it’s here. I haven’t watched broadcast television in almost a decade. Streaming is just so easy, and cable and satellite is just so hard, not to mention expensive.
For some strange and not really a troublesome reason, the Tubi telecast was in Spanish. I considered it a compromise between Spanish and mute. Heck, I might even pick up a few words of Spanish and learn something which might be useful someday. I have a personal theory; The mute button on the television was put there as a direct result of sports color commentators.
Fun near Fact, in the early days of television the mute button was also known as the Howard Cosell button.
Do you know what really makes a football game extra exciting? Some guy yammering nonstop nonsense explaining in explicit detail and with high near frantic degree of emotion all about what we all just watched a mere ten seconds ago. “Nagurski hikes the ball to Smith. Smith trips on his shoelace for a one-yard loss.”
Oh My GOD! Did you see that! The most amazing play in NFL sports history! Watch this replay five or six times. See? SEE! Here’s where he stepped on OWN his shoelace! Can you believe it! I’ll mark it here on the screen for those of you at home unfamiliar with shoelaces. Not since the great Johnny Unitas played shot and stabbed in the 1960 Championship game has there ever been such a fateful play!
It comes from the network’s belief that you will become bored just watching sports. What you really want is some yahoo to jazz it up for you. Bozo was busy, so we got this guy. “Hiya Kids! I mean sports fans! Yuck, yuck, yuck!” It sure is great to be here in city name. The famous home of local attraction. Tell them it’s going to be a great game because nobody ever says that. Then point out the obvious as often as you can and repeat, repeat, repeat!
We’ve got the statista bot 9,000 warmed up and working overtime out in the truck. Guaranteed to spit out useless facts at an astounding rate previously thought impossible by modern man. There are more than seven thousand blades of grass in an average square foot of NFL turf. The Superdome uses more air conditioning than Chicago’s Soldier Field! It would take the average person more than 3.2 years to dice enough onions for the Super Bowl. The French Quarter isn’t actually French but American! You just can’t enjoy the game if this heckerped were to ever stop talking. He averages over 6.5 clichés per televised hour at five thousand feet above sea level in night games. And he’s a Sagittarius! Mute Button!
I was disappointed with this year’s crop of “Special” Super Bowl commercials. A much lower caliber of advertisers. Caution; if you are cliché averse, stay 100 feet back. The ads once attempted to be clever and colorful. The ink has dried in the pen and the idea is scratchy and unclear now. Why bother? Rather than clever, let’s just hire an over the hill celebrity to perform the cliché. Huh? Huh? Pretty good huh? Huh? Can I work at Disney now?
I watched the halftime show and laughed myself silly. It was a musical act which wasn’t intended to appeal to me. It was directed at a completely different audience entirely. Imagine, if the halftime show were done in Italian Opera. Nothing wrong with Italian Opera, only most of the audience are not fans and are unlikely to become fans during a football halftime show. But what made me laugh out loud was the choreography.
Back in the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no one bigger in Hollywood than Busby Berkeley. Famous for his overhead camera shots of dancers, synchronized kicking around the singer or waving together like a flag. The only two words I caught in the entire performance were “government cheese.” Which I thought odd for forty-year-old cheese distribution scheme should be mentioned by a man of 28. But it wasn’t aimed at me, so of course, I couldn’t understand it. My father didn’t understand Jimi Hendrix.
Few acts survive NFL halftime shows. For the icons it is the announcement that your career is largely over. Take the money and run to Hawaii! Your calendar is now empty for the foreseeable future! For up-and-coming acts, the NFL halftime show can be the kiss of death. To your diehard fans you’re a sell out! And if they don’t know who you are by the time you do a Super Bowl halftime show. They don’t care and never will.
Maybe this was the best act available. A big event for some and rough waters for others. Why else book a fringe act? A musical act that appealed to no more than 20% of the audience. Next year, Italian Opera! But the best event was the first act instead of last as the large group of dancers all entered the stage from one primped out and lowered (Cliché)Buick. Last time I saw something like that, Ringling Brothers did it with clowns. They don’t do stuff like that in Italian Opera.
I felt sorriest for the Kansas City fans. To spend all that money, go all that way and it was over before it ever really got started. Next year, we’ll floor them all with a really hip naked rendition of “Don Giovani” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that will knock their socks off! They’ll all be fans once they hear Italian Opera at a football game!
¡Primero abajo y diez! ¡Se acabó el tiempo!
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