The Cable Guy gets its Super Bowl moment

I didn't watch the Super Bowl. Living in Australia, I gave that up quite some time ago, and even when my Patriots were regular participants, I couldn't watch until later that night due to my work being in its busiest period of the year. Even then, I did not get the ads that play in the U.S., and stopped trying to seek out all but the most newsworthy ones after we'd lived here for a few years.

Well, there was one particularly newsworthy one for me personally this Super Bowl.

Through Facebook, in a post where the child of one of my high school friends was asking her mother what cable was, I learned that The Cable Guy is having a moment in the sun -- 26 years after it was largely dismissed by everybody, critics and audiences alike.

The film has gained in stature some over the years, more in a cult way, but I never guessed it was ripe for a tapping of our collective nostalgia, especially so long after the moment of its greatest cultural relevance. 

As you would know if you watched the game, Verizon played an ad in which Jim Carrey dressed up for presumably the first time in 26 years as Chip Douglas -- that's not his real name -- to comedically reflect on how times have changed since we all once had a cable coming into our homes, providing us access to movie channels. If you haven't seen the ad, you can find it here. 

The Cable Guy makes a perfect foil for Verizon 5G internet, also referenced in the ad as "5G ultra wideband." (And you can bet I sympathized with Chip, who says he's never heard of it.) But that doesn't mean that the movie itself would have been a slam dunk for this sort of treatment. Carrey probably didn't come cheap -- nor did buying an ad slot in the Super Bowl -- so they had to be really certain they were conceptually on track with this one, and felt like they were presenting a reference point that really resonated with the audience.

I'm surprised The Cable Guy fit that bill.

When concepts like this have been explored in the past -- dredging up old characters in pop culture to feed our nostalgia -- it's been with the likes of Ferris Bueller and Kevin McCallister, not Chip Douglas. (And if Matthew Broderick already appeared in the Ferris Bueller one, would it have killed him to show up here?)

The even stranger thing is that the writers play on specific moments in The Cable Guy that only someone who had seen it a couple times would probably remember, like Chip's reference to it possibly being illegal. It's not just Carrey's familiar look or the apartment setting, which could be gleaned from stills from the movie. It's actual dialogue.

Well, as a guy who has this ranked #16 on Flickchart, I feel vindicated. Although a lot of people I know certainly appreciate The Cable Guy and realize it's not the turd some people thought it was, no one loves it as much as I do. 

I'm so glad I stumbled over that particular Facebook post, otherwise I have no idea how soon I would have encountered this ad. I like to think that my love for The Cable Guy has been projected outward to everyone who knows me, and that people would bring me little nuggets of Cable Guy ephemera like peons bringing tribute to a king, but I could be wrong about that.