Amazon’s Super Bowl LIV ad takes us on a history lesson to ask what people did before we could ask Alexa anything.
Ellen Degeneres and wife Portia de Rossi kick off the ad with Ellen telling Alexa to turn down the thermostat.
“What do you think people did before Alexa?”
Then the ad takes us time traveling to see how people asked for such things as turning down the heat.
A woman in the past tells her maid, Alessa, to turn the temperature down two degrees. The maid reaches into the fireplace, pulls out two burning log sand throws them out the window, shattering the glass. A man is heard outside screaming.
Then, a queen from days past calls on her jester Alexi to tell a joke. He fails miserably.
Next, a young newspaper boy named Alex is calling on people to “Get your news here.” When a man asks him what the news is today, he responds, “Doesn’t matter. It’s all fake.” They both laugh, but Alex then shakes his head in frustration.
The next scene shows two men on the wagon trail. One asks the other, Al, to “play that song I like.” When Al starts to blow on his jug, the first man says. “Al, next song.”
Then, two women apparently in England of the past are doing the wash. One asks the other, Lexi, to tell her something interesting.
“OK. The earth is flat, and a witch stole his pants,” she says as a man walks by without trousers.
Then we break out of history and into a moment of fantasy as a woman in a castle puts a message in a capsule for a pigeon named Leximus to send to her love, Prince Constantine. Unfortunately, Leximus is captured by an eagle. Both are then devoured by a dragon.
Finally, we see the Oval Office and President Richard Nixon. He tells his assistant, Alesha, to remind him to “delete those tapes.” Those tapes, of course, were key evidence that ultimately led to Nixon’s near impeachment before he resigned from office over the Watergate scandal. Alesha looks at the camera and says “I ain’t deleting…”
Then the commercial turns back to the present with Ellen and Portia getting in their car. Ellen asks Alexa to play that song she likes, which is “Yeah” by Usher, but the song begins sounding like it’s played on a jug, similar to the wagon train scene.