Many of the best-received commercials during Sunday's Super Bowl referenced movies -- they just weren't for movies heading to the local cineplex any time soon.

Several car ads that sparked some of the biggest interest on Twitter and other social-media platforms during the big game alluded to classic older films.

(NOTE - A new poll on this website asks which Super Bowl ad you most enjoyed. Click HERE to cast your vote.)

Atudio spots for major upcoming releases -- including Marvel's "Avengers," Universal's "Battleship," Disney's "John Carter" and Paramount's "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" -- passed without any great excitement or anticipation from a large number of online commenters.

Companies paid an average of $3.5 million for a 30-second spot, to be seen by what ratings experts believed would be well over 100 million viewers.

Marketers paid homage to "Star Wars" (Volkswagen) and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (Honda) during the big game, generating strong word-of-mouth before and during the action.

Volkswagen revisited the boy in the Darth Vader mask from its buzzed-about 2011 spot titled "The Force," bringing the child back to settle an issue in the "Star Wars" cantina. Meanwhile, in a spot directed by Todd Phillips and starring Matthew Broderick, Honda made numerous references to "Bueller" without ever mentioning the 1986 movie's name. The commercial aired early in the fourth quarter at 60 seconds, truncated from its more than 2 1/2-minute run-time online last week.

Both the "Bueller" and "Star Wars" commercials played on the nostalgia that those in key thirty- and fortysomething demographics have for those properties.

Fox attempted to make use of that nostalgia more literally with its commercial for "Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace 3D," hoping to kick off a Skywalker revival when the movie opens in 3-D this Friday.

A classic era of American filmmaking was also referenced in another way, with one of the most buzzed-about spots Sunday featuring preeminent filmmaker Clint Eastwood, offering a message of economic hope on behalf of Chrysler. Commentators on Twitter both praised the spot and joked about its campaign-ad flavor.

Even a classic of a different sort, "The Twilight Saga," got its due from Audi, which nodded to the vampire trend with a commercial featuring fanged ones in a nighttime setting, throwing in a Robert Pattinson look-alike for good measure.

Among commercials that retailed movies as a product unto itself, it was harder to discern a clear winner.

Last year, Paramount scored a big response when it unveiled the first TV commercial for "Super 8," J.J. Abrams' coming-of-age science-fiction film. The closest comparison Sunday evening was for a different Paramount film, spring's "The Dictator." Like "Super 8," the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy is not part of a major franchise. But the ad played before the game and did not at first blush generate the same intensity of online response as "Super 8."

"Battleship" and "G.I. Joe" occupied the spot that the "Transformers" franchise did last year, with explosion-filled commercials revealing little about the film and instead mainly serving to remind viewers a movie was coming out. "John Carter," Disney's expensive gamble that hits March 9, also failed to stand out as one of the more buzzed-about ads.

One test for a new release will come with "Act of Valor." Relativity Media's spot for the Navy SEALs action picture followed the Bueller ad and didn't spark a strong reaction. But the company will quickly be able to see if the investment paid off -- the movie opens in less than two weeks.

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By Steven Zeitchik - Los Angeles Times (MCT)

(c)2012 the Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

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OPINION COLUMN

Super Bowl ads? Seen 'em all

I almost smiled during that Super Bowl ad where the dog goes on a diet so he can slip out his pet door and chase a Volkswagen. Almost. And if I hadn't already seen it 30 times on the Internet . . .

As Don Meredith used to sing as the clock wound down in Monday night football games, "Turn out the lights, the party's over." The annual buzzfest over the epic commercials that debut during the Super Bowl is about to come to an end, because there aren't any new commercials that debut during the Super Bowl.

More than half of the 70-odd ads that aired during Sunday night's Super Bowl telecast had been circulating on the Internet for days or even weeks. At $3.5 million a pop for a 30-second commercial, advertisers want to leverage every eyeball they can -- and they've discovered the way to do that is to preview the ads online.

Honda's CR-V ad with Matthew Broderick reviving his "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" character, goofing off from work instead of school? It had already been seen more than 10 million times before game time. No hyperbole -- 10 million mouse-clicks on American computers. The VW-chasing dog? More than two million.

The Teleflora ad promising that your girlfriend will turn into a hypersexual supermodel if you just send her some flowers? Seen it. The college kid who thinks he's just gotten a Chevy convertible for graduation but really it's a mini-fridge? The Toyota Camry ad featuring a couch made of lingerie models, a poopless baby and a crime-fighting plant? The polar bears fumbling a Coke bottle like a pack of furry Dolphins wide receivers? Seen 'em all.

The ad leakage to the Internet was so profound that the website SuperBowlAdsForGeeks.com actually ran a list of ads that weren't released on-line before airing. (The site's name is no exaggeration; it also posted a list of frequently asked questions that started off: Q. What is the Super Bowl? A. A professional football championship game.)

Some advertisers got amazing mileage by releasing commercials that they merely pretended were for the Super Bowl. The pro-gun-control group Mayor Against Illegal Guns not only got its ad -- a chat between Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Menino, the mayors of New York and Boston, about the evils of guns -- posted on dozens of websites but run in its entirety for free on both NBC and MSNBC news shows. Actually, the group didn't try to buy time on the NBC telecast of the game, but merely sold it to a few local markets at a fraction of the cost, but wound up with millions of dollars in free publicity.

A related scam -- deliberately making ads so outrageous that they're guaranteed to be rejected by network censors, then trumpeting them as "banned by the Super Bowl," seemed to decline this year. In 2011, a bunch of companies -- led by Ashley Madison, a dating service for cheaters, and the fairly self-explanatory website GodHatesObama.com -- played the-ad-they-don't-want-you-to-see game. This year, there was only one: TheBigandtheBeautiful.com, a dating website for the jumbo-sized, rejected after it included a shot of a barely-thonged butt in its ad.

There were some exceptions to the new on-line-first rule. The Chrysler ad with Clint Eastwood, in his best Dirty Harry voice, suggesting that it's downright un-American to buy a car anywhere but Detroit made its debut during the game, possibly because on repeat viewings it's going to look silly. So did a candy ad featuring the most nudity since Janet Jackson's nipple ran amok in 2004. In this case, however, the wardrobe failure was suffered by an M&M, so the FCC fines are expected to be light.

There were a few other ads that pushed the television envelope, though in some cases their salaciousness was generally obscured by their inscrutability. I am still trying to figure out what a young boy peeing in a swimming pool has to do with Taxact.com's income-tax software. Others were less opaque, particularly a H&M underwear ad with soccer star David Beckham strutting and stretching in his tighty whiteys in a way that gave a whole new meaning to "bend it like Beckham."

Sex is hardly new to advertising, but the weirdness running through many of this year's commercials was. Doritos seemed to think it could sell more chips with one ad in which a dog murders the household cat and buries it in the backyard, another in which a baby is used as aslingshot. (OK, I laughed a bit at that one, when no one was looking, but I'm still sticking with Fritos.) Then there was the Audi ad, in which the company bragged that its headlights are strong enough to kill vampires. Perhaps that's a strong selling point in Transylvania and I've just underestimated this globalism stuff.

Vampire-killing headlights seemed pretty puny next to the claims in a Chevy ad that claimed its Silverado is the only truck that outlast the end of the world. The ad ends with a small group of survivors looking downcast as they remember a friend who didn't make it: "Dan drove a Ford." When the ad debuted on the Internet a few days ago, Ford protested -- I swear to you, I am not making this up -- that tests show its trucks would survive the end of the world even better. I myself am waiting to hear from the Consumer Reports Independent End-of-the-World Testing Lab before making a decision on a new truck. Hopefully the vampires will not get me first.

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By Glenn Garvin - McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

(c)2012 The Miami Herald

Visit The Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.com

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