Let’s Celebrate This Year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show By Watching Another One
New Kids On The Block, in 1991. A classic of the #SuperBowl half-time genre.
The Super Bowl kicked off in Phoenix, Arizona at around 10.30am AEST today, pitting the New England Patriots against the Seattle Seahawks in a televised ball-kicking game that, like so many others before it, will ultimately mean nothing at all.
Interrupting the action this year was a spectacular halftime performance from Katy Perry, Missy Elliot and Lenny Kravitz, featuring dancing trees, stoned beach balls, fireworks, acrobatic chess pieces and a giant mechanical lion.
Pow.
If that doesn’t sound like your thing, here’s another classic of the genre: New Kids On The Block in 1991, performing ‘Step By Step’ and ‘This One’s For The Children’. The performance, posted today on Facebook by New Kids themselves, was epic, book-ended by a horrifically saccharine production of ‘It’s A Small World After All’, featuring 2500 children of different ethnic backgrounds in honour of the children of the Desert Storm troops.
Produced by Disney, 1991 marked the first time a contemporary pop band had performed during the Super Bowl’s half-time show; until then, college marching bands and local artists had done the honours. The show was also notable because it was never actually broadcast — ABC waited until the break in the football to air an update on America’s first war in the Middle East, because apparently America wasn’t in the mood for entertainment. Unless, of course, it happened to be football.
