Culturalist.com is the place to shape, share and debate your opinions on anything and everything through Top 10 lists. Want to join the conversation? You can make your own list of the Top 10 Best Super Bowl Halftime Shows by selecting your favorites, ranking them in order, and publishing on Culturalist.
Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz are set to bring some halftime spectacle to the Arizona desert for Super Bowl XLIX, and Culturalist's users are looking back at halftime shows past to see how they'll stack up against the performances that came before them. And there are some real doozies.
Here's a rundown of some of the weirdest, wildest, most memorable moments from recent Super Bowl halftime shows; do any of them make it on to your list?
#5 - Sketchy Andy
You may better know him as "That Dude in a Toga Who Bounced on a Rope with Madonna", but Super Bowl halftime show afficianados know him as Sketchy Andy, the slacklining performace artist who made America sit up and ask "What is it, exactly, that we are even watching right now?" With tricks of balance and bodily control that defied both gravity and common sense, it became the you-gotta-see-this moment of a star-studded performance.
#4 - SNL at the Super Bowl
Halftime for Super Bowl XXXI in 1997 was fronted by The Blues Brothers, a 21-year-old Saturday Night Live skit. To put that in perspective, it would be equivalent to this year's halftime show featuring Adam Sandler singing "The Chanukah Song"...which we would totally watch. Dan Ackroyd, John Goodman and Jim Belushi might not be the first names you think of when you think "Super Bowl Spectacular", but the sheer energy they brought to their in-character performance actually managed to outweigh a good bit of the weirdness of them being there in the first place.
#3 - Frosty the Snowman
The official headline performer of Super Bowl XXVI was Gloria Estefan, which is reasonable by 1992 standards. But there must have been some magic in the Metrodome that day, because about halfway into the show a group of children wearing blue cellophane pants showed up and began to earnestly rap about Frosty the Snowman. It's a thing you really have to watch to understand. Just soak it in.
#2 - Indiana Jones
Not everyone knows this, but every Super Bowl halftime show dating back to Super Bowl III in 1969 has an official "theme" that (theoretically) ties it all together...and in 1995, the theme for Super Bowl XXIX was Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. Yes, for reasons we cannot even begin to fathom, Indiana Jones headlined halftime, during which he attempted to recover the Lombardi Trophy from an ancient cult of ninjas. Seriously. 83.4 million people watched that happen.
#1 - Nipplegate
C'mon, you knew it had to be here somewhere... When Justin Timberlake triggered Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" at the end of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, the collective national pearl-clutching catapulted the performance to the center of a widespread debate about decency in American media (along with a record-setting fine for CBS and a hearing before the Supreme Court). The moment became the most searched term for two years, and directly led to the creation of YouTube. We take our nipples seriously.
Agree? Disagree? Come join the conversation by visiting Culturalist to see all of the most recent performances and make your own list of the Top 10 Best Super Bowl Halftime Shows now!