In honor of this weekend’s big game, we decided to pay tribute to one of the most indelible football songs, and videos, of all time. Deep breath, everyone, let’s get this all out at once, so we can move on.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
For anyone who wasn’t there, man (spoken like a Woodstock hippie), it’s easy to make fun of “The Super Bowl Shuffle.” Bad rhymes, dated drum tracks, a SAX SOLO (ah, the ’80s), and so on. But think about this track for a second. They recorded this in the middle of the season, well before the Big Game would ever be played. That takes some stones, you know? (And allegedly, some of the players agreed: Dan Hampton opted out of participating on the track.) Can you imagine if the New England Patriots, their AFC opponent, had actually knocked them off? Or worse, they don’t even make it to the Super Bowl? Think about what a PR nightmare that would have been.
But that’s just the thing about the 1985 Bears – they were so good that no one batted an eye at the thought of them recording a song where they declare their dominance over the rest of the league before proving it on the field, and of course, they wound up wiping the floor with the Patriots on Super Bowl Sunday, to a 46-10 score. At the same time, so what? Sure, they won the Super Bowl in 1986. This video, meanwhile, is eternal. Whoops. If only they had known about YouTube back then.
Bonus video: this one didn’t cross our radar until a few years ago, but holy cow. In 1986, the Los Angeles Dodgers decided to do a clip of their own, called “Baseball Boogie,” and there is only one word to describe it: fabulous.