It was a mixed bag for Super Bowl ads this year. It usually is, but I wonder if we’re just expecting too much from advertising companies on that first weekend in February. Their job isn’t to entertain us, it’s to sell us crap. Some firms managed to do both in the time alloted, and at almost $6 million per minute, that’s worth acknowledging.

There were a couple standouts: obviously the VW ad, and we’ll get to the rest in a bit. Max Pagehasm, the kid in the Darth Vader suit in the Volkswagen ad, appeared on the Today show this morning. Max is closer to Vader than one would have originally expected; he was born with a congenital heart defect and had to be fitted with a pacemaker. That child is more machine now than man…twisted and evil.

As for the others, well, that’s what we’ll attempt to parse out here. For the second year in a row, I’ll be reviewing every ad from Super Bowl XLV. These were my ground rules for eligibility:

  • Ads are rated for memorability, scale, and message economy. I’m not necessarily rating the ads by my own personal preference so much as by whether or not the company actually spent the money on the ad, and should have done so.
  • Ads for Fox shows are ineligible (Sorry, Glee).
  • Ads for films are not reviewed. Movie previews are supposed to be awesome, and all the time. If a quality 30-second synopsis can’t be made out of a 90-minute film, then it’s hardly the fault of the people creating the ad.
  • Ads during halftime aren’t counted (Suck it, Chatter).

Brace yourselves for another clickfest. The pages are broken up by every grade or so (A through F), so you can do the math for the most part. Agree or disagree in the comments; you’ve already seen these multiple times by now, anyway. We’re embedding as many as we can (while they’re still up).