Thursday, October 30, 2014

Laces In

The Super Bowl between the Eagles and the Dolphins in 'Ace Ventura: Pet Detective' was a pretty remarkable game.  For one, Miami apparently became the first team to qualify for the Super Bowl in the same season that their home stadium hosted the game, giving them a theoretically huge home-field advantage.  If you ever needed proof that I'm a hopeless sports stats nerd, it's probably the fact that I cited this tidbit first, ahead of the many other outlandish things from this movie.

So anyway, besides the Dolphins hosting the Super Bowl in Miami, you also had the saga of Dan Marino being kidnapped the night before the actual game.  To my knowledge, this is also the first time this had happened in NFL history, though if some of the Broncos had been kidnapped the night before last year's Super Bowl, that explains a lot.  (This isn't to say that some crazy stuff hasn't actually happened to players on Super Bowl Eve, however.)  Knowing Marino's competitive nature, it isn't at all surprising that he returned at halftime and immediately got into the game --- even after 24 hours of captive hell*, I suspect only wild horses could've kept Marino out of that game.

* = though he didn't seem more than mildly annoyed during his scenes in the film.  Let's just say that Dan Marino was not exactly a Best Supporting Actor contender.

One of the more interesting factors about this Super Bowl was that Marino (and Snowflake the mascot!) made their triumphant returns yet we didn't actually see the result of the game.  Frankly, I felt the filmmakers copped out on that would've been a controversial finish either way.

If the Eagles beat the Dolphins, then even in a pro-Dolphins Hollywood movie, Dan Marino still can't win a ring.  Frankly, I think Ray Finkel would've been satisfied simply knowing that his actions cost Miami the game --- that's already sweet revenge.

If the Dolphins beat the Eagles, it puts the icing on the movie's happy ending cake.  It also makes sense that only the Eagles would lose the Super Bowl in the most implausible way possible.  I mean, they're already up against it by unluckily facing the Dolphins at a home Super Bowl, only to receive the incredible break (if you can call a kidnapping and attempted murder a 'break,' which most Eagles fans would) of having Dan friggin' Marino get abducted the night before.  And he's not even there for the first half!  Can you imagine this happening in real life?  This would be the news story of the year.  The NFL couldn't postpone the game for TV and sponsor reasons, so they'd have to go ahead and play the Super Bowl under this unprecedented cloud for one of the teams.  And then to have Marino actually RETURN AT HALFTIME AND TAKE THE FIELD?  I feel like the other networks would've simply cut to live footage at this point --- this would be like the moon landing.  Meanwhile, the Eagles are just shaking their heads and thinking "why us?"  Pat Solitano Sr. probably lost a small fortune betting on his Eagles in this game.  That's probably how he got into such a deep hole to that sleazy Giants fan guy to begin with.  I love it when movies intersect.

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