Kendrick Lamar’s riveting, incisive Super Bowl performance is likely to go down in history for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was the most watched halftime show of all time. It was a sharp contrast against what the Super Bowl’s entertainment interval used to look like — for instance, three decades ago, when it was devoted not to a blockbuster artist, or a tribute to the host city’s music scene, but instead to… Indiana Jones.
Let me give you some context: My friends and I recently tracked down decades’ worth of previous Super Bowl halftime shows on YouTube in order to rate and rank them for fun. We had a blast rediscovering shows we’d loved, and watching performances we’d never seen before. I highly recommend getting a group of friends together to revisit them. Somehow 2004 was even worse than we remembered! Diana Ross leaves her performance in a freakin’ helicopter!
We also saw firsthand the way the halftime show evolved from the kind of marching-band performance you’d see at a college game (albeit with a slightly bigger budget), into the mass entertainment extravaganza it is today. The crux of the issue was that broadcasters (and advertisers!) needed the halftime show to be enough of a draw that viewers wouldn’t channel surf during the break and never return: Winter Magic wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Even with the need to pivot toward more popular entertainment, an Indiana Jones stunt show now seems like an odd choice for the 1995 Super Bowl, especially since the franchise’s third (and at the time, final) movie had hit theaters in 1989. But Indiana Jones was a multimedia property in that era. Two seasons of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles aired from 1992-93, sometimes in the time slot right before Monday Night Football. A series of four TV movies followed, with one a year coming out from 1994 to 1996. In 1995, Disney was also just a few months from opening a new Disneyland theme park ride: Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Forbidden Eye. That made the Super Bowl a perfect chance for some corporate synergy.
The 1995 show didn’t completely leave musical acts behind: Between action set pieces with Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood fighting to recover the stolen Lombardi Trophy, Tony Bennett and Patti LaBelle serenaded the crowd. The show culminates with the entire cast singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from Disney’s The Lion King, released a year earlier.
Overall, the stunt choreography is a strangely good match for the spectacle of halftime, though the show is problematic in all the ways Indiana Jones always has been. If you’d like to know more about how this Super Bowl halftime show happened (and about the tragedy at the 1996 halftime show, which makes it unlikely we’ll ever see another halftime stunt spectacular), check out Bleacher Report’s excellent deep dive on the show.
