29% Of People Wish They Could've Seen This Super Bowl Halftime Show Live
Ah, the Super Bowl. Granted, not everyone everywhere has a passionate, almost religious, devotion to football and the great annual festival of all things gridiron. For a moment, don't think about the restrictions on gatherings during these days of living pandemically. Even if you're hunkered down or bunkered up with just your immediate household, there's still one fascinating aspect of Super Bowl Sunday: how that one particular game, of all the games throughout the year, can actually bring people together — not just the couch-bound experts, the amateur coaches, the once-upon-a-time athletes, but also people who know next to nothing about the sport. Because they aren't there for football; they're there for a) the food and/or b) the commercials and/or c) the half-time show.
And what a show it is, too. (The half-time show, not the game. Though the game tends to be pretty spectacular, too.) According to Medium, the halftime production dates back to the first Super Bowl itself in 1967. Did it feature The Beatles, or even The Monkees? Nope: stars were The Three Stooges and two collegiate marching bands.
Since then, of course, the show has gotten more elaborate and complex, more star-studded and, yes, certainly more expensive (though surely the Stooges were working for more than scale). And just as nearly everybody has that moment in history (sports and otherwise) they'd like to have witnessed and didn't, true fans of the Super Bowl have their own short wish list of Super Bowl halftime shows they would have loved to see live.
The Prince of Pop is the top of the survey
To that end, Grunge News did a quick survey recently, and 518 worthy souls in the US gave an answer to the question: Which Super Bowl halftime show do you wish you'd seen live?
The answers were varied. You might think there would be a big high-five for the infamous Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" in 2004, when viewers got flashed for nine-sixteenths of a second, says E! Online. Instead, our survey respondents focused more on the actual entertainment value of the productions in question.
Short answer: No, the Stooges didn't make the cut. But Beyoncé is in the top tier, with 11 percent of the votes, though voters didn't distinguish between her 2013 show and her joint appearance with Bruno Mars in 2016. (Does it matter? We're talking Beyoncé here.) To perhaps no one's surprise, the joint Jennifer Lopez/Shakira appearance last year took 13.51 percent of the votes. Next up was Lady Gaga's 2017 performance, which racked up 16.22 percent of votes cast. Prince famously performed "Purple Rain" in what's described as a "downpour" in 2007, and 20.46 percent of the voters wish they'd been there for that one.
And tops? Also not surprising, a full 28.96 percent of voters wish they'd witnessed Michael Jackson's 1993 show in Pasadena for Super Bowl XXVII. According to Sporting News, it was the first time the ratings for the athletic event actually increased between halves. And rightly so.