(Sorry this is the wrong video, it’s the making of the sequence I discussed, if I can find the finished product I’ll put it here)

For something like 20 years now Hank Williams has been working for Disney/ABC/ESPN redoing weekly versions of “all my rowdy friends are coming over tonight” as the intro to monday night football.  He made a pro Mccain/Palin version of the song last November also.  Along with “I’m proud to be an American” it’s maybe the unofficial anthem of our country.

I watched the opening yesterday and was blown away by it.  What happens is that HW is performing on stage in a museum of some kind (the pro football hall of fame?).  At the end of his song he plugs two cables into each other and this causes two gigantic CGI-stone football player statues on either side of the stage to come to life.

They smash into each other and out of the ensuing explosion two football helmets with the logos of the teams that will be playing tonight burst out of the statues discarded bodies like snakes coming out of their skins.  Then the helmets break through the roof of the museum and fly into space where they are observed by an astronaut on a space station.

The helmets come back to earth and are now gigantic in size and hovering over Gillette stadium outside Boston.  They face one another and pull away from another and you can´t help but feel a sense of dread for that terrible moment as the helmets hang there in space.

Then of course the helmets smash into each other, exploding again and showering the fans at the stadium with cgi debris.  Is there anything more that the producers could have done?  Could they have possibly given us more?  They presented this sequence of conflict, death, rebirth, space travel, and then violent conflict to the point of annihilation and then symbolically showered the audience with the ashes born from the explosion.

It’s like the Aztec rituals you read about it history books isn’t it?