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Super-Gross 'Sleigh Ride' Tops Infamous Ads List

By WALT BELCHER, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 31, 2008

MSNBC has come up with a list of the top 10 sleaziest advertisements in Super Bowl history, and my favorite commercial came in at No. 1.

I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed.

For more than 20 years, I have spent Super Bowl Sundays watching and ranking the commercials. I seldom keep up with the game itself because I have to write between the breaks.

I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in Super Bowl sales pitches. In Sunday's BayLife, I preview the 2008 offerings.

The ad that stands out was shown only once - during the 2004 Super Bowl, the same year that Janet Jackson had her infamous wardrobe malfunction (which I missed because I was only watching the commercials).

In this infamous Bud Light commercial, a man and woman are on a moonlit ride in a one-horse open sleigh. They stop for a romantic moment but when the man lights a candle to create the mood, the flatulent horse lifts its tail and ignites a flame that scorches the woman's face and hair. At a loss for words, the man says, "Do you smell barbecue?"

Unfortunately, the nanosecond glimpse of Jackson's breast overshadowed everything else that aired. Outrage reached such a fever pitch that the horse breaking wind was cited as another example of society going to hell in a handcart (or in this case a hansom cab). It was never shown again.

Peter Hartlaub, who helped pick the sleaziest commercials for MSNBC, notes that it's all subjective.

The list also includes the busty women catfighting for Miller Lite in 2003; Mike Ditka tossing a symbolic football through a tire for erectile dysfunction drug Cialis in 2004; the 2000 ad for E-Trade, in which a man is being examined by doctors who find money coming out his "wazoo"; and a 2003 Budweiser ad in which a man in an inverted clown suit walks into a bar and drinks a beer through a hole in the costume's crotch.

All were high-water marks in low-brow humor. But when you're selling beer to guys, you can't go wrong going for the cheap laugh. That's why "Sleigh Ride" remains the most sophomoric, gross, tasteless - and, yes, most hilarious commercial in Super Bowl history.

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