Surprisingly, there was a serious lack of sex in this year’s lineup of Super bowl commercials. Instead, one might venture to say that there was simply a over concentration of relatively primal humor: for example Bud Light’s game of rocks-paper-scissors, Doritos’ “Live the Flavor”, and Kevin Federline’s daydream of musical fame during his fast food shift.

The general consensus is that the majority of commercials were less than stellar.

Humor, of course, is eternally relative, but, how many people are going to laugh their sides out when Garmin’s GPS’s commercial depicts a duel between a map monster and a proud Power Ranger GPS owner?

Of even worse taste was Pizza Hut’s commercial where Jessica Simpson ditches the red carpet to chase down some pizza, though perhaps Pizza Hut should be given some slack considering Slices was closed on Super Bowl Sunday ’07 and anyone would have done the same. On top of it all FedEx in no way defied gravity with its moon office, pioneer ad or unexpected homicidal meteor, nor did Sierra Mist’s ad which was set in a martial arts studio rack up any records.

“Please attack Sierra Mist for wasting the last two minutes of my life with that ad,” senior Jane Maguire said.

But enough about the flops, there were a few folks who did it right. For starters, Doritos. Adhering to the growingly popular trend of TV of making the everyday American feel like a star, Doritos held a contest this year, inviting commercial submissions from the general public. No surprise, Americans stepped up to the plate and created some laudable ads; the five finalists of the contest each received $10,000 dollars. The winner, Dale Backus of Five Point Productions, competed with over 1,000 other entries for the spot on Super bowl Sunday and was the creator (with the help of others) of the fun “Live the Flavor” Doritos ad.

The ad was an admirably funny, short narrative, labeling various moments of a driving male, pedestrian female interaction from “spicy” to “cheesy” to “crunchy” to “bold” to “smooth.” Bud Light and Blockbuster had some jovial winners too. Budweiser not only made the Super Bowl fans laugh with its auctioneer minister, they really managed maximized their time limits (the minister, like most auctioneers, talked a mile a minute in order to facilitate the wedding guests’ early alcohol consumption). Blockbuster’s play on the double meaning of a mouse in its ad highlighting Total Access was comedic and a general hit.

Despite all the ups and down there was a surprisingly wide range of companies represented in this year’s Super Bowl commercials. Of course the biggies like Coca-Cola and Bud Light had their multiple 30 seconds of fame, but smaller companies were represented as well.

“It was pretty crazy to see the variety of companies represented in the Super bowl commercials,” said junior Drew Kostic. “Normally, you would expect only giant conglomerates in these spots not random dot-com industries like godaddy.com. Still, I liked them.”

The Super Bowl lineup showcased greater diversity and the finer and finer line between the regular Joe Shmoe and the celebrity making when it comes to making it onto the television screen.

The ads were, overall, mildly amusing and successful, although watching two men tear off their chest hair in the hopes of forgetting they may have kissed while performing maintenance on a car most likely did not make anyone want to grab a Snickers.