Best part of the Super Bowl

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The best part of the Super Bowl this year was the commercials.

Ah, who’m I kidding? This was the best Super Bowl in years. Exciting, tense, closely fought. Great defensive performances from both teams, clever strategizing on all sides. Bill Belichick and his staff made a great call asking for a review of a play in which a Giants player turned out not to get off the field in time — key reversal there. Eli Manning held himself together in his non-showy way, and pulled off a couple of outstanding plays, especially in the play where he pulled off a bunch of defenders and threw an awesome pass to … well, frankly I don’t know to whom, because I never watch the Giants. But today they were impressive, and they won resoundingly.

An aside: What was the deal with Bill Belichick leaving the field with time left on the clock? I wouldn’t expect that his team would score, but it seemed unsportsmanlike to leave while the game was still in progress. That’s a Randy Moss move from way back, and as Uncle Crappy pointed out, even Moss stayed on the field until the end this time.

The commercials were not as exciting as the game, for once, but I still felt compelled to watch them. One I was particularly pleased to see was for the Pixar movie WALL-E. The first trailer for this movie was not impressive: It focused mainly on the genesis for the idea, which is interesting only to John Lasseter, and maybe not even to him.

The commercial shown during the game focused on characters from Toy Story, which was marginally better. But the commercial was enough to remind me that the movie will be out this summer, and that led me to search for any other trailers that might be about.

This brought me to the video I’ve embedded above. In each Pixar movie, there’s at least one new thing that they haven’t been able to do before. In Monsters, Inc., it was realistic fur. In The Incredibles, it was realistic animated water and hair. In this case, the new thing appears to be dust.

WALL-E lives in a future world in which he and the roaches are the only ones still around. Everything else is desolate — Mad Max desolate. From what I can see in this trailer, the surfaces, air, and light all play on each other like what you’d see in a spaghetti western. That’s gonna be awesome.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that you can see a much clearer version of this trailer, plus a lot more WALL-E stuff, at the Apple website.