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Top Super Bowl commercials 2011: six winners and losers

Super Bowl commercials have become a mini-film festival, keeping the less-than-diehard football fans in front of the tube. But this year’s top spots are singled out for their misses as much as their hits.

CareerBuilder.com / AP
In this screen shot provided by CareerBuilder.com from this 2001 Super Bowl commercial, the chimpanzees are back at work – or should that be 'work' – torturing hapless colleagues.

Winners and losers

CareerBuilder.com / AP
In this screen shot provided by CareerBuilder.com, the CareerBuilder chimpanzees are back at work – or is that 'work' – torturing a hapless colleague.

  • By Gloria Goodale Staff writer

“This year’s Super Bowl ads are pretty underwhelming,” says Robert Thompson, founder of the Bleier Center of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York. It’s not that the ads were failures, he adds, just a tad tired.

“Monkeys parking cars and dogs hosting a party – those things were funny back in the '80s, but they need a little updating today,” he says. Even so, the water-cooler value of Super Bowl ads remains high, so here we present the commercial touchdowns and fumbles from the 45th annual Super Bowl broadcast.

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