Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

TV

Bring back the bands at halftime

I’m about to waste your time and mine by making a Super Bowl suggestion so sensible that it’s completely out of the question, even laughable: Instead of sustaining this protracted course in which Super Bowl halftimes have become pop-culture musical variety shows for tapered target audiences and with performances often infused with dubious value, why not restore and reward a great tradition of football by allowing marching bands to perform?

Not just any marching bands, but to borrow from an old song, the best bands in the land!

And rather than risk being dismissed as an old-timer who doesn’t regard, say, twerking, as appropriate for a national audience tuned in to watch a ballgame, I first wrote this Super Bowl marching band suggestion years ago. It was out of the question back then, too.

In, for example, the marching bands of Ohio State University and Southern University (the “Human Jukebox”) marching band, we’re blessed with two of the most entertaining and spellbinding acts ever to respond to a whistle.

OSU’s is a massive, high-tech operation that blows minds with its fantastic full-field reenactments of such things as a Mickey Mouse — scores of marching musicians form Mickey and take him for a walk — to an end zone-to-end zone Pac Man game. One watches in awe, applauds in awe.

Southern’s band adheres to its Baton Rouge address with a series of high-stepping, horns-blaring, cymbals-crashing rhythm and blues — all loaded with brilliantly choreographed energy.

I have never seen a fan at a football game walk out on or cease watching a good marching band — even if it means saving the bathroom for the start of the third quarter.

And I have seen fans double-back — abandon their trip to the food and drink stands — after catching a glimpse of a good marching band.

And, as the late Billy Mays hollered, “But wait! There’s more!”

The likelihood of a marching band halftime performer intentionally grabbing at his crotch — as did Michael Jackson in 1993 — or the staging of a female breast jailbreak — Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, 2004 — is small.

As family entertainment goes, the above marching bands are successfully designed to thoroughly entertain your families, as opposed to the Manson Family.

But again, no shot. That’s not how America rolls these days. We roll downhill, faster and faster and faster.


Next year’s Super Bowl halftime show is already a go: In a best-of-five, end zone to end zone, Justin Bieber will drag race against his father.

While media coverage of the funeral in Newark of “poet” and black “social activist” Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) showed that it included some heavy hitters — Danny Glover, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, Oprah Winfrey, convicted former Newark Mayor Sharpe James — none saw fit to “keep it real” by reading any of Baraka’s hate-filled, bigoted works.

For example, his “poem,” “Black Art,” didn’t make the fond-recollection cut. It in part read, “We want poems that kill, assassin poems, poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons, leaving them dead, with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”

Catchy, ain’t it?

So how does this work? How is it reconciled? Yeah, but he was our racist.


Ever notice how those who “call in the next 10 minutes” might actually have 10 hours, 10 days or 10 weeks to take advantage of that exciting, special offer?

Shoot, it seems those commercials for Dragon voice-recognition computer applications have been pitching a “special limited time offer” — $99.99 reduced to $59.99 — for well over a year.