If the Nintendo Switch 2 had been announced earlier in the year, its new spot with Paul Rudd wouldn’t have been out of place among the Super Bowl’s usual crop of big-budget ads. And no, I don’t mean that as a compliment.
I love Paul Rudd. I grew up on his movies like I Love You, Man, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Anchorman. Friendship, which Rudd co-stars in with (potential funniest person on the planet) Tim Robinson, is one of my most anticipated upcoming film releases. This is a guy who I’ve always liked, so I don’t think he’s the problem with Nintendo’s new Switch 2 ad.
The problem is that it’s going for reheated nostalgia, just like so many Super Bowl ads do. But when the nostalgia being invoked is for a commercial — not a piece of art like a movie, TV show, or game — that’s bottom of the barrel stuff. If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately punch ‘Paul Rudd SNES commercial’ into YouTube to get a glimpse of the real deal, then get depressed that even with those lowly aspirations, the Switch 2 commercial falls glaringly short.
Reheating The Super Nintendo’s Nachos
The original commercial Paul Rudd starred in for the Nintendo SNES had an idea. The tagline was “Now you’re playing with power: super power”, and the commercial was shot and staged to make SNES games look powerful. Rudd plays them on a huge movie theater-sized screen.
His face is lit like a movie star against the nighttime backdrop. Random nearby people are drawn to the games like bugs to a zapper, and they’re shown in silhouette against the screen, highlighting the seductive power of the SNES.
Rudd gets to be an individual, the desirable in-the-know player who summons the magic of a new console. Everyone else are merely drones, on the outside looking in. It has a concept, and it executes upon it with gorgeous cinematography. It looks better than most movies released today, honestly.
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The Switch 2 commercial, by contrast, looks boring. It has no real idea beyond, ‘Remember how Paul Rudd was in a Super Nintendo commercial before he was famous? What if we brought him back for a Switch 2 commercial, where he’s dressed the same and says some of the lines from the old ad?’
It swaps “playing together” in for “playing with power,” and the commercial shows off the Switch 2’s GameChat feature and its camera accessory as Rudd plays with friends and relatives, including comic actor Joe Lo Truglio.
But the original Switch’s iconic first commercial did a much better job of showing off people playing together. There is a thematic link between the Switch 2 being a powered-up Switch and the SNES being a powered-up NES, but the big idea is really just nostalgia.
2020s Commercials Look Way Worse Than ‘90s Commercials
My big issue is that while Mario Kart World looks much more impressive than the games featured in the original ad, the new commercial looks so much worse. That ‘90s SNES commercial looks truly cinematic, with movie star lighting on Paul Rudd’s face, stark contrasts between the darkness and the light, and moody use of silhouettes.
The new commercial looks like… well, a commercial. The lighting is attempting to be moody, but just looks flat in comparison to its reference point. Rudd looks like he’s wearing a costume. Where the original was sincere and cheesy, the new one is winking and referential.
And that’s the biggest problem with 2020s culture: it’s predominantly backwards-looking. Whereas a big commercial in the ‘90s or ‘00s would be built around a cool idea, ads in the 2020s are built around nostalgia and stunt casting. One of the biggest Super Bowl commercials in recent years was a Breaking Bad reunion to sell PopCorners, and this is just a version of that.
The Switch 2 looks like an awesome console. But if Nintendo wants to sell players on that, especially with the high price for the hardware and its games, it needs to do a little better than nodding to the past. After all, advertising a new console with nostalgia for 1991 may just make people nostalgic for how much less a console cost back then, and Nintendo probably doesn’t want that.
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