TVSquad

(NOTE: The following post talks about my favorite commercials of this past Super Bowl. There are absolutely no spoilers in this post. That is, unless you didn't watch the Super Bowl, recorded it for future viewing, and have decided to ignore every single other media outlet, as well as friends and family so no one tells you who won. If that's the case, don't blame us for your extremely poor time management skills.)

Well, it's all over except for the pack-up, the clean-up and the over-analyzing of the analyzing of the game that was actually played in Tampa. Super Bowl XLIII is now in the history books and so are its commercials. This year featured some returning companies, some new ones, plenty of NBC promos, and a koala puppet being punched in the face. In other words, a bit of everything. Out of all of them, here are some of my favorites.

(NOTE 2: The embedded videos come courtesy of Hulu. If you cannot view these videos I have linked the commercial titles to another site that you should be able to view.)

A new column here at TV Squad, where we talk about all of the things you're missing when you hit fast forward on your DVRs.

I thought I'd kick off the very first Brought To You By...column by talking about yesterday's Super Bowl ads (apparently there was also a game of some sort played...). USA Today did their annual ranking of the best and worst of the ads, having a bunch of viewers watch the ads with meters and give an opinion on the good and the bad, and for some reason Bud got the top spot, the way they do every single year. It must be that the people who vote on these things like horses, wacky comedy, or they're all drunk (on Budweiser). The company got three of the top ten slots, and number one went to the spot where the dog trained the horse, accompanied by the Rocky theme. It's bad enough that Bud seems to win over viewers every year, but this dog/horse ad wasn't even the best of the Bud ads yesterday!

Anyway, I have my own thoughts on the best and worst, and I'll list them after the jump.

Do you have a special person in your life that is eternally optimistic?

When you've got a bad case of the Mondays, is there some annoyingly perky person at your workplace who is always chipper and talking about what a great day it is?

Then perhaps you can relate to this commercial as much as I did.

Even though this was a really low-key commercial, I still loved it. Who hasn't had the horrid job they wanted to quit, but by that time they felt so bad about themselves they couldn't bring themselves to do it? I loved the fat, Henry VIII-ish-type boss too, and how surprised he looked to find the flag-waving heart on his desk.

The Career Builder logo crushing the building was a nice touch. I don't know how effective this ad will be at getting customers, but I liked watching it.

TiVo's released a top 10 list showing the commercials that TiVo owners watched the most during the Super Bowl. The list includes two Doritos commercials that were produced as user-generated videos in a Frito-Lay/Yahoo Video contest, and a Chevrolet Ad produced by 19-year old University of Wisconsin Student Katie Crabb as part of a similar contest.

The complete list is after the jump.