The Worst Super Bowl Beer Commercials Ever

Super Bowl commercials are a strange beast. Every other day, we avoid advertising, but when the biggest football game and T.V. event of the year arrives, we all can't wait to see the ads. Companies pay millions for the ad space, then spend another bundle on making the spots. What exactly do we want out of a Super Bowl ad? If history is any indication, viewers like them to evoke some kind of visceral reaction, be it laughter, warmth, or surprise.

Probably because so many people watching the Super Bowl on T.V. are doing it at a party, the broadcast is frequently interrupted with commercials for social lubricants, like beer. Some of both the Super Bowl's best and worst drink commercials promote beer, usually the ones made by the major manufacturers, as well as favorite craft beers likely made by a certain brewery giant. The Super Bowl can feel like it's all just part of some kind of "Drink More Beer" campaign. No matter the exact brand, these ads pull out all the stops to get noticed and make an impression when so many eyeballs will potentially see them. That doesn't always turn out well. A great many Super Bowl beer commercials, particularly in retrospect, come across as crass, unfunny, ill-conceived, or gross. Here then are the worst Super Bowl beer commercials ever.

In its ideal form, a Super Bowl beer commercial should make millions of viewers want to immediately drink a beer. The big brewers probably don't want potential customers to have to face a moral conundrum over what they eat and how it's prepared. "Lobster," a Budweiser commercial aired during Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999, does just that.

The scene opens in the bustling kitchen of a big city restaurant, with a chef in the traditional toque about to casually place a living lobster into a pot of boiling water in order to kill it and cook it. This lobster, rendered cartoonishly with big, bugged out worried eyes, knows exactly what's going on and is understandably terrified. Seeking a way to avoid his impending, painful death, it uses its pincer to grab a bottle of frosty Budweiser from a passing waiter's tray. The kitchen staff goes into a panic, treating it like a hostage situation as the lobster threateningly holds up a claw and scuttles backward out of the restaurant and to his freedom. A customer gets the punchline: "Guess I'll have the steak," he says sarcastically.

Because it's hard to tell T.V. viewers what a beer tastes like through an audiovisual-only medium, many beer companies instead sell a lifestyle or mood in their ads for a product that tastes a lot like the competition's. But there's no pleasant, laid-back or aspirational vibes in "Not the Same," a commercial for Miller Lite that aired during Super Bowl XV in 1981. It stars a trusted name in football, ex-coach and color commentator John Madden, stomping around a tiny, dingy, and crowded bar. All the while, and, in attempting irony but not quite arriving there, he obnoxiously brays at a high volume about how he's a more relaxed person since he's left the stressful job of NFL head coach, and that the reason he's so chilled out now is that he drinks a lot of beer.

After swinging his arms around and touting how Miller Lite has less calories to a bunch of dead-faced, seemingly half-drunk middle-aged guys, the commercial cuts off a still rambling Madden and a static logo and chyron pop up on the screen. But Madden isn't done. The not at all relaxed commentator bursts through the branded content wall to talk about how he loves to drink beer some more.

A once popular beer that sadly disappeared, Beck's Sapphire was a smooth, mild tasting pilsner with a much higher than usual alcohol percentage of 6%. To make it seem classy, Beck's packaged and sold Sapphire in black bottles (not blue; the "sapphire" refers to the German sapphire hops used in the recipe). To make it a known entity and viable product, it spent a ton of money on an animated commercial broadcast during Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. The end result is a poorly lit ad of questionable taste and inexplicable sultriness.

To the strains of a moody, airy remix of BLACKstreet's suggestive 1996 hit "No Diggity," a goldfish lovingly swims around the bottle of beer. Then the viewer realizes that the fish is the one singing the song, and he gets real close to the inanimate object as he delivers suggestive frustrated lyrics like "I think about the girl all the time" and "I got to bag it up." It would seem that Beck's Sapphire is a beer for both fish that look like Nemo from "Finding Nemo" and the very lonely.

Historically, Budweiser has gone the humorous route with its Super Bowl commercials, crafting short sketches that don't really have much at all to do with beer or persuading customers to buy its products instead of others. They're designed to be memorable and charming and to stick in customers' minds having made a favorable connection to a brand name. Budweiser's commercial for Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000 looks like a short film and has the beats of a comedy sketch, but it's painfully unfunny, if not just painful.

"Rex's Motivation" opens on the set of a generic western movie. An adorable dog sits atop a fallen gunslinger, unfazed by the death of his apparent human companion, prompting a slick and smarmy movie studio type to berate the put-upon director into getting the dog actor to cry and wail on command. The filmmaker provides Rex his "motivation" — to think back to the worst moment of his life. The fantasy sequence indeed makes Rex wail in pain and make everyone happy. While chasing a Budweiser truck in slow motion — evidently, dogs are big beer drinkers — he doesn't see where he's going and he violently smashes his face into the side of a lawn maintenance van.

The concept here is that persistent, unwanted, and come-ons of a sexual nature as lewd as network television will allow apparently aren't sexual harassment — they're supposedly hilarious, if they're delivered by a talking monkey in a shirt. That's Bud Light's commercial prepared for Super Bowl XXXIX in 2004 in a nutshell.

A guy named Brian invites a woman to his apartment and introduces him to his roommate, Frank, a chimpanzee. When Brian leaves the room to procure a couple bottles of Bud Light, Frank makes his move on the young woman, as Brian is evidently unaware that the animal can speak. The victim of his aggressions can only stare in open-mouthed bafflement, although it's not clear if she's shocked that the pet chimp can talk, that her new boyfriend doesn't know his pet chimp can talk, or the terrible things that come out of the mouth of the pet chimp. "Baby, I do a little bit more than just talk," Frank says. "Let's head upstairs," he suggests before impersonating the sound of squeaking bed springs. Yikes.

For "Tune Out," its commercial that aired during Super Bowl XVIII in 2004, Budweiser deftly landed on the notion that no matter which football team a viewer might be rooting for, they all shared a hostility toward referees. The ad starts off with what resembles in-game footage, with a referee calling a play and standing still in a static shot while a head coach absolutely berates the guy, screaming in his ear and menacingly walking around him. This amuses the sportscasters calling this fictional game. "He's beating him like a rented mule," one offers. "And the ref's just tuning him out."

One of the broadcasters wonders aloud how a referee — staring off into space with the most hangdog and forlorn of expressions — develops the skill to be able to just stand there and take such abuse. The ad shows us how: It cuts to the official at home, where, in an embrace of hoary, sexist cliches, he's getting a dressing-down by his screaming wife with a litany of complaints and grievances. In trying to appeal to viewers who hate referees and their partners, Budweiser ran out of time to even mention or depict its beer.

Televisual special effects have come a long way, even in the past 20 years. But the hopelessly dated, computer-aided high-tech imagery used in "Just a Game," an ad for Budweiser's low-calorie, low-carb Select light beer that aired in 2007 during Super Bowl XLI, maybe weren't even that great back then.

The spot serves to stroke Jay-Z's ego whenever possible. During a formal party in a swanky townhouse filled with beautiful people dressed to the nines, most guests have gathered around a table where the rapper and legendary NFL coach Don Shula — never explicitly identified; viewers just have to know it's him — are engaged in an intense game of futuristic and holographic video football. They control their squads by just kind of waving their hands around while also rapidly muttering play calls and numbers. After many close-ups of the action on the fake field, and it's hard to tell what's even going on there, Jay-Z wins the game — or are they gods controlling real football players? — to the delight of the observers. After a tag about Budweiser Select, Jay-Z gets the last word, telling Shula that when they play again, he'll win his Super Bowl rings off of him.

At the 1995 Super Bowl, Budweiser debuted new mascots: three grotesque frogs who hang in a swamp whose ribbit sounds like "Bud," "Weis," and "Er," as shown on a neon sign on a dilapidated bar at the water's edge. For the rest of the '90s, these frogs popped up in numerous animated, suspiciously kid-friendly commercials, always with the same dull gimmick. In 1998, Budweiser, sensing Americans had grown tired of its frogs, decided to kill them off. The murderous plot, made to sound like it came out of a mafia movie, was chiefly executed by the lead lizard, Louie, who speaks with a stereotypical Italian-American accent.

This all went down in "Master Plan," a series of multiple commercials aired during Super Bowl Super Bowl XXXII. It's a pretty gruesome and shocking sight when the plan succeeds — in one segment, the neon Budweiser sign falls into the swamp and gruesomely electrocutes the frogs to death. However, they aren't really dead — Louie explains in a later ad that the fictional frogs didn't actually die, and that this was all done for the purposes of entertainment.

Bud Light aired a commercial called "Classroom" during Super Bowl XLII in 2007, the peak of fame for stand-up comic Carlos Mencia. At the time he was starring on the hit Comedy Central variety series "Mind of Mencia," a show that relied so much on well-trod, hackneyed racial stereotypes that Mencia often had to defend his work against such loud criticisms. "Classroom" is a very dated and potentially offensive extension of that woeful "Mind of Mencia" formula.

Mencia portrays an instructor of an adult education class of some kind, be it English as a second language or American cultural immersion. He means to teach a room full of recently arrived immigrants how to order a Bud Light in bars across America with respect to regional slang — "Hey feller, give me a Bud Light" in the South; "Give me a Bud Light, you got a problem with that?" in New York, for example. Then the big punchline comes: Mencia asks the class what to do if they are asked for a Bud Light, for some reason. The class replies, in unison: "No speak English." After a reminder to buy Bud Light, the ad delivers a second harsh ending with Mencia frustratingly unable to teach a man from southeast Asia how to pronounce "Bud Light."

The makers of Bud Light spent a lot of money to present and produce this epic commercial for Super Bowl XLI in 2007, and yet it barely mentions beer at all, because it chooses violence. At a bar, a guy buys a round of Bud Light for his friends and offers up a fist bump. He's left hanging by one of his pals, who lets him know that fist bumps have become passé in favor of a slap across the face. Everybody in the scene gets slapped.

Then, the commercial depicts the impact of the trend. In what remains of the 30 second commercial, 12 more slaps occur, all juiced with the exact same sound effect. It's a montage of violence, because none of these slaps occur in friendly, happy situations, immediately abandoning the conceit. Rival professional basketball players slap each other, angry guys at a party slap each other, co-workers slap each other, and two crying brides slap each other, for example. It all ends with a bookend — the original fist bump presenter is congratulated on a job well done by his generic businessman boss and offered a fist to bump, but he slaps the man, instead. He's not happy about such casual chaos and cruelty.

Despite being a mass-produced brew by a beer conglomerate that must use a complicated process to remove carbs and calories from its product, Michelob Ultra Pure Gold is a certified organic product. In seeking to convince consumers that the beer is just that natural and pure, or that it's the beer to choose for those who think they don't like beer, it prepared "The Pure Experience," a commercial that aired during Super Bowl LIII in 2019.

It's loaded with disorienting, rapid-fire, stock footage clips of the wilderness — birds, mountains, fields, big skies, sunsets, rivers, etc. — before turning into an aggressively relaxing and uncomfortably intimate trend-chasing ASMR video, which was the style at the time. Michelob Ultra is aided in its mission to equate the goodness of nature with its light beer, as well as relaxation with drinking alcohol, by actor Zoe Kravitz, who smirks and whispers live narrative platitudes about purity while tapping her nails on a bottle and pouring a beer directly in front of an array of microphones. It almost makes one skin crawl, which is kind of the point of ASMR, but it's hard to see how this sells beer, although that also encourages relaxation by way of bringing on a feeling of drunken sleepiness.

One of the weirdest ads to ever force its way in front of a mass audience, Miller Lite's "Evil Beaver" spot from Super Bowl XXXIII in 1998 told a tale of America's westward expansion and revenge. Made to look old and feel historical with a sepia tone and a subtitled, silent film style, the commercial presents a wagon pulled by pack animals, occupied by settlers who navigate the untouched wilderness of the 19th century. "Hey, let's live in the woods," one of them decides, and they all majestically get to work, chopping down trees and building some cabins.

But then, the beaver spots them. "Thieves!" screams the animal — a human male actor in stage makeup and a costume that sort of resembles that of a beaver. No longer a silent film, a heavy metal song in which the only lyric is "evil beaver!" plays while the evil beaver destroys the settlement. He rides in on a dirt bike, chews down a house and wrecks the roof. The humans run away screaming in terror while the so-called evil beaver helps himself to the Miller Lite they left behind. This is likely the only Super Bowl commercial to ever feature a guy in a beaver suit biting off a man's wooden peg-leg.