27going to be a sellout: Approximately 32,000 of the 93,607
seats at the L.A. Coliseum were empty. But Rozelle was
smart enough to know that his new championship would
live or die by how it came across to the 51 million fans
watching on TV. To prevent those viewers from turning
the channel at halftime, organizers decided to turn to
someone who understood the priceless value of razzle-
dazzle. Luckily, they were already in Hollywood’s backyard.
Tommy Walker had been a bigger-than-life promoter
on Walt Disney’s payroll since the opening of Disneyland
11 years earlier. Like P.T. Barnum, albeit in a crisp cardi-
gan and with a head full of Brylcreem, Walker dreamed
big and could conjure special events like a magician.
Turning the mundane into the memorable was his life’s
work: He was the man who came up with the six-note
“Charge!” fanfare, after all. He was tasked to deliver some
Hollywood pomp and pageantry during halftime, and
he did. Most famously, with a pair of daredevil jet-pack
pilots from Bell Aerosystems who zipped around the
Coliseum 60 feet above the field just like James Bond had
in Thunderball. It was the Super Bowl’s first Tinseltown
moment, and it wouldn’t be the last. The Coliseum and
the Rose Bowl in Pasadena would end up hosting the
Big Game another five times combined, each time tap-
ping into some of Hollywood’s glamour.O
N THE FILM front, the 1970s brought a string of big-
budget, star-studded disaster movies. These pandemo-
nium-drenched epics were more than just another cinematic
fad; the studios were responding to something in the zeitgeist.
Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (’72), The Towering
Inferno and Earthquake (both ’74)—the list goes on. At the
back end of this tsunami came two films that would occupy
a very specific subgenre: the Super Bowl Disaster Movie.
As news about hijackings, corrupt institutions, an
unwinnable war, and disasters both natural and unnatural
dominated the headlines, moviegoers chose to exorcise
their fears at the multiplex. It was entertainment as mass
catharsis. In 1972 grand-scale dread had even touched the
usually peaceful world of sports when eight members of
the Palestinian terror group Black September stormed
the Olympic Village at the Munich Games and murdered
11 Israeli athletes. Taking a page from the world of fact,
Hollywood would release a pair of Super Bowl disaster
f licks just a year apart.
First out of the gate was 1976’s Two -Minute War nin g,
a not-so-white-knuckle thriller based on a bestseller by
George La Fountaine about an unhinged sniper picking
off fans at the Super Bowl. Since the filmmakers—shock-
ingly—couldn’t get the NFL’s cooperation, the Super Bowl
is called “Championship X” in the film, a matchup osten-
sibly between Baltimore and Los Angeles, with no team
nicknames mentioned or logos shown. The actual squads
shown on the Coliseum field are USC and Stanford—B-roll
footage taken from a ’75 Pac-8 game.
Although Universal spared no expense when it cameFEBRUARY 2022chosen until a mere six weeks before kickoff. Still, the one
aspect of the inaugural game that was not left to chance
was the halftime show.
NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle bristled at calling
the game “the Super Bowl,” which he thought was too
gimmicky and glib for what he perceived to be the lofty
stature of his league. (He preferred “the Big One.”) In
the end, organizers went with the more straightforward
(and decidedly uncatchy) “AFL-NFL World Championship
Game,” the “Super Bowl” moniker not becoming official
until two years later.
As the event approached, it was clear that it was not
PRODUCTION VALUES
The tradition of a halftime spectacle, which
took off with jet packs at the L.A. Coliseum, now
moves to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, where a
lineup of hip-hop legends will perform.H
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