In Defense of Super Bowl Halftime Camp
By Michael Jones | February 6, 2021
There’s camp. And then there’s Super Bowl halftime shows. Football pun intended, they are a league unto themselves.
Diana Ross in a helicopter? Yes.
A caravan of Disney kids belting “It’s a Small World” that morphs into an explosion of New Kids on the Block dancing to “Step By Step”? Absolutely.
An Elvis-inspired magician, a 3-D commercial for Diet Coke, a 1950s musical revue, and the world’s largest card trick? Heck yeah.
But as bananas as all of that sounds, they and every other Super Bowl halftime show pale in comparison to the campiest Super Bowl spectacular. For that, you have to go back to January 26, 1992, and Super Bowl XXVI.
And you may want to take the edible now so that it kicks in right as the show gets going.
Super Bowls aren’t synonymous with winter. In fact, in the 25 years of Super Bowls leading up to Super Bowl XXVI, only one (1982’s Super Bowl XVI) was played in a winter climate (Detroit). But as the 80s came to a close, Minneapolis was granted rights to the 1992 game, and planning commenced to showcase the coldest city ever to host a Bowl. And a halftime show slogan was born: Winter Magic.
Conceived by Timberline Productions, perhaps most well known at that point for producing Sesame Street Live performances, the ’92 halftime show is a buffet of everything that made the 1990s an incomparable decade: professional figure skaters, kids rapping, showgirls, rollerbladers, and Gloria Estefan.
History hasn’t been kind to this Super Bowl halftime show. It’s been dubbed “one of the worst ever.” And the FOX network even took a giant jab at this show, running a live episode of In Living Color at the same time that lured 22 million viewers away from the Super Bowl. That fact alone scared the NFL enough that pretty much every year since ’92, the halftime show has been centered around blockbuster musical acts that no one wanted to turn away from: Michael Jackson, Beyonce (twice), Lady Gaga, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, and Janet Jackson (infamously), to name just a few.
But for lovers of a time in television history where over the top performances—think Carol and Mike Brady doing a Conga line with Milton Berle and Tina Turner, or a Snow White role play to open the Oscars—could find themselves at the center of a national audience? Super Bowl XXVI is among the last relics of an era of peak camp TV.
0:00-1:00
Prepare yourself for some of the best visual effects this side of a high school “morning announcements” set. That right, the halftime show opens up with a visual motif of animated snow on a windshield, being wiped away to reveal a football stadium full of the cast of La Cage Aux Faux people in costumes. And not just any costumes: we’re talking walking snowflakes that fill a stage in the middle of the field as if they’re about to charge the opposing team. The camera pans to two Olympic superstars dressed for the tundra: Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano. The figure skating pair with no ties to Minnesota but who know a thing or two about ice by being figure skating gold medalists get the show on the road.
Dorothy Hamill: “Hi everybody!”
Brian Boitano: “Come on and feel the cold!”
Dorothy Hamill: “Come to Minnesota where winter is the hottest time of the year!”
Brian Boitano: “It’s Winter Magic!”
Someone find an Emmy for scriptwriting, stat! But if that cold open (heyoo) doesn’t do it for you, just watch the dancers on the field magically start to spell out the words “WINTER” and then, as if it were, er, magic… “MAGIC”.
Here’s hoping that edible has kicked in.
1:01-2:00
Now that we’ve been properly welcomed, the field bursts into a jazzercise class as heaps of white people start a routine to a song aptly called “Winter Magic.” There’s leaping, then some spins, then more leaping, and then some ballroom dancers come into focus as they dance to peppy lyrics like “Winter Magic: Come feel the cold.”
As minute two is about to expire, the cameras pan out and give us a birdseye view of the set where all of a sudden blue and white streams of fabric unfold (picture those weird parachutes that were so popular in 1980s elementary school classes), and reveal a series of mini stages sprinkled throughout the football field. Then the music changes and the most Macy’s elevator version of “Winter Wonderland,” a Christmas carol rarely played this late into January, fills the stadium, kissing the ears of everyone watching with the ever-familiar “Sleigh bells ring, are you listenin’...”
2:01-3:00
Moments into the third minute, an 80-piece orchestra somehow appears on the field. It’s unclear where an 80-piece orchestra was hiding, but this is the first moment they come into focus. One likes to think the football turf was so moved by this halftime show, it just decided to birth an orchestra. But there they are stringing their violins to “Winter Wonderland” as the ballroom dancers finally take over the jazzercise class and dominate the stage. So confident are they in their ballroom dancing, they overextend their hand and start salsa dancing while the voices singing “Winter Wonderland” adopt what can only be described as “island” accents. This is definitely racist, and it was still racist in 1992, but just ignored by most viewers.
3:01-4:00
You might be thinking “This is a weird halftime show,” but things don’t really start getting weird until minute four. Nothing says “American football” quite like “The Nutcracker Suite.” And nothing says “The Nutcracker Suite” quite like Russian acrobats, a color guard with streamers so dangly they would make any high school marching band jealous, and of course – nightmarish 50-foot tall inflatable snowmen, blown up on the field to haunt the dreams of every child watching for the decades to come.
4:01-7:00
For the next three minutes, if you had “Kids rapping to a remixed version of “Frosty the Snowman” while joined by the University of Minnesota marching band” on your bingo card, you are about to be very lucky. Heaps and heaps of children pile onto the field in MC Hammer-esque parachute pants, singing “Do the Frosty!,” the lyrics to which are priceless.
Say yo you know I’m Frosty and I’m talking to you all
I’m the Fresh Prince for the women, chilling out, standing tall
Feeling good I’m solid, from my head down to my toes
With a top hat I’m a bad cat… let’s fly women, go!
Frosty…… pump it up! Chill out.
Frosty…… pump it up! Ice man!
With a little bit of magic, and a little bit of stance
This fresh and funky snowman is gonna up
Gonna up
Gonna up into a dance
DO THE FROSTY!
How heartbreaking there’s not a Grammy Award for “Best Christmas song turned into a KidzBop rap” because if there was, this would have swept the category. And what a hallmark moment for parachute pants.
7:00-10:30
Because halftime show organizers seemingly felt like they had to acknowledge every single thing related to winter, next we get a salute to the Winter Olympics. Dorothy Hammil and Brian Boitano come back out, this time to skate on what looks like a 12-inch circle of ice while a karaoke version of Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time” fills the MetroDome. It’s a sharp change of tone from the Frosty rap, which might lead one to think that the tempo is about to cool down.
But nope, because after a few spins from Hammill and Boitano, the 1980’s men’s USA hockey team arrives on the stage with hockey sticks that shoot fireworks and an avalanche of rollerbladers. And not to go down the lyrics rabbit hole again, but holy shit they all start dancing and moving to an original song seemingly called “Champions!”
Champions, don’t stop us!
Champions, don’t stop us!
We’re having a good time, having a good time!
We are champions, reaching for the sky!
Even higher, putting our powers to the test
I’m a racing car, flashing by
I don’t need a driver
I’m going to go go GO
Gotta be the best!
You can bet everything you own that those 22 million people who tuned away to watch the In Living Color special didn’t experience something as special as this.
10:30-13:00
To close out the best worst halftime show ever, the most wintry and coldest of Super Bowl halftime shows brings out… Latin music superstar and queen of Miami music’s scene, Gloria Estefan. Pretty much no one hears the words “winter magic” and thinks “Gloria Estefan.” Except, of course, for the producers of Super Bowl XXVI’s halftime show, and frankly, thank god they did.
In 1992 Estefan was still among the biggest names in pop music. Less than two years earlier she had survived a massive bus crash that nearly killed her, and one year before had one of the most epic American Music Awards performances in history when she walked out on stage post-accident for the first time (that iconic blue dress!), performing “Coming Out of the Dark,” which became a Billboard Hot 100 #1 for her.
There’s more to be said at some point on the camp legacy of Gloria Estefan, but let’s just say that when it comes to Super Bowl XXVI, Estefan is along for the journey. She enters the field on a stage attached to a giant cut-out of the Statue of Liberty, wearing a pearl-bedazzled showgirls outfit. She’s living and loving this halftime performance, and starts belting out her song “Live For Loving You” while the field-full of color guard members, orchestra members, Russian tumblers, Olympic athletes, ballroom dancers and jazzercise students become her dancers.
Estefan’s set is quick and with a “Come on, Minnesota!” she transitions into her second and final song of the night, “Get On Your Feet.” And for whatever reason, the pedestal Estefan is on starts shooting up toward the sky, such that by the time Estefan finishes the song, she’s not only on her feet, she’s 100 feet up in the air towering over everyone in the arena.
Super Bowl XXVI’s halftime show is always going to be laughed at. But instead of ignoring it, chucking it into history’s dustbin, or maligning it as a relic, camp enthusiasts should embrace it. And not just embrace it, but every Super Bowl rewatch and celebrate this wild, silly, end-of-an-era, corny, disconnected, strange moment where for 13 minutes in history, America’s most macho sport was transformed into a place where figure skaters, ballroom dancers, acrobats, color guard troops, and Gloria Estefan made the entire nation (minus 22 million people watching In Living Color) turn their heads and go: “What the hell is this?”
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.