This weekend, Super Bowl 56 is coming to Southern California. And this year, it's a Cincinnati Bengals versus Los Angeles Rams. Now, my producers aren't down for four plus hours of sweaty men shoving, running, and passing. But the NFL makes sure that they don't feel left out. To them, they offer the halftime show.

I'm Gustavo Areano.

You're listening to The Times, Daily News from the LA Times.

It's Thursday, February 10, 2022.

Today, courtesy of the NFL network in CBS, we look at the history of this curious spectacle, from its humble beginnings to the megastar extravaganzas of today.

And along the way, we'll take a look at how this roughly 15-minute intermission became an unlikely reflection of American culture.

Here to talk about all of this is my L.A. Times colleague and pop music critic Michael Wood. Michael, welcome to the Times.

Thanks, Gustavo. Good to be here.

So when we think of the Super Bowl halftime show today, we think global stars speeding through medleys are their greatest hits while hundreds of backup dancers and fans go crazy and the stage that they set up in like five minutes.

But it wasn't always this way.

In fact, for nearly half of its history, the Super Bowl halftime show was boring and corny A.F.

Brutal and yet true.

Yeah, so the first Super Bowl was actually held here in L.A. at the Coliseum.

Pags went into the end zone and Max Mee has grabbed a second touchdown pair.

Sports fans may remember that it was Green Bay at Kansas City.

And for the halftime, the University of Arizona marching band was invited to play the show.

I mean, that's how little that NFL thought of the Super Bowl, which wasn't named the Super Bowl back then, by the way, at that point, that the NFL could even get USC's way more famous band, you know, the hometown band. They had to go to Arizona to get their band. Indeed. And what they did was they sort of did this theme, right, where they're going to take viewers on a musical tour of the four corners of the United States for whatever reason.

So they start out by playing The Sound of Music,

the famous musical that people know from stage and screen.

This was 1967, just a few years after the Sound of Music movie came out, which was like a smash success.

So the music would have been fresh in people's minds.

And also, you know, this was an age when pop music was pulling a lot of songs from Broadway,

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