I actually enjoyed watching the Super Bowl half time show last night – but not for the aging hystrionics of Roger Daltry, Pete Townsend and a bunch of stand-in musicians now calling themselves The Who.  I guess The Who must be considered a “safe” choice as they fit the bill for that sort of large stadium spectacle.  CBS didn’t help matters by showing stock footage of a significantly younger Who during the promotional commercials only emphasizing the contrast when the actual band took the stage. I noticed they didn’t play “My Generation” which now has sort of an ironic overtone doesn’t it?  I wonder if they regret the lyrics “I hope I die before I get old”.  Oh well.  Never the less, it was sort of painful to watch. 

What wasn’t hard for me to watch was the spectacular stage set up.  I did a bit of google sleuthing and wasn’t able to find out who did the conceptual design, engineering or production on it but I thought it was pretty darn cool!  If you didn’t see it – the stage was a circular array of multi-colored lights that had been programmed to for a variety of conventional lighting and video effects.  The fact that it was circular was particularly interesting and I suspect presented some software and hardware challenges as we are most used to thinking of our output displays in rectangular format.  The electronic aspects of the stage were integrated with the Laser Light show and Pyrotechnics to form a pretty compelling visual image.  All-in-all The Who got kind of lost in the production which was just fine by me.