Super Bowl Ad Uses Footage Of 9/11 To Sell Historical Vacation

[news]

[news]

Watching the Super Bowl for the commercials was an unexpectedly bleak way to spend a Sunday night this year.

Colonial Williamsburg, that place in Virginia you may have visited on a school field trip, tried to encourage viewers to travel there in a commercial that used footage of one of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin Towers in New York.

NBC anchor Tom Brokaw narrated the commercial, which featured various moments in American history played in reverse. The intended meaning -- besides convincing you to spend money on hotels, restaurants and ghost tours in Colonial Williamsburg -- was to position the area as the birthplace of America.

However, the commercial makes no mention of Colonial Williamsburg's role as the former capital of Virginia or being the home of College of William & Mary (the alma mater of Thomas Jefferson and, as full disclosure, the author of this article), which seems more fitting than the historical clips they did air.

The footage of 9/11 was used in context to signify a hardship Americans have overcome. The overall idea for the video seemed to posit that without Colonial Williamsburg, the featured moments in American history wouldn't have happened. This works for raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. It kind of, sort of works for Barack Obama's election. But saying we wouldn't have had 9/11 without Colonial Williamsburg seems like a misguided moment for a Super Bowl commercial.

The commercial aired in the New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. areas.

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