Honda's Super Bowl commercial for 2017 is all about chasing dreams, and nothing says "dream chasing" like school yearbooks. To convey hopeful exuberance, Honda uses yearbook photos in its Super Bowl commercial. However, the images aren't just any yearbook photos — they are celebrity yearbook photos. In the optimistic ad, before-they-were-famous celebrities come to life to give inspirational advice. The entire spot focuses on these awkward — and oh-so-relatable — pictures, and the celebrity yearbook photos in the Honda Super Bowl commercial are real. So if you have been wanting to see famous people in their adolescent glory, your moment has come.
The commercial kicks off with high school Tina Fey talking about how you don't always know where you're going, all while holding that staple for female senior photos — a red rose. This image may be familiar to Fey fans, since she has proudly showcased her high school yearbook photo before on 30 Rock for her character Liz Lemon. From there, the animated real-life photos of Robert Redford, Amy Adams, Magic Johnson, Steve Carell, Missy Elliott, Stan Lee, Jimmy Kimmel, and Viola Davis join Fey in expressing the importance of dreams in a truly impressive famous person lineup.
The commercial advertising for the Honda CR-V will air during Super LI on Sunday, Feb. 5, but the car company shared it on the Thursday before for the ultimate Throwback Thursday post.
Sure, the pictures being animated is a bit unsettling, but the precious photos more than make up for it. Plus, it's strangely reminiscent of Honda's 2016 Super Bowl commercial, where the company used technology to have sheep sing Queen's "Somebody to Love."
According to Advertising Age, the yearbook photo commercial was created by the advertising agency RPA. Once the celebs were cast through their talent agency, RPA "obtained their old pictures, which were then placed into practical shots of real yearbooks." That means that while the photo of Carell is real, the guy he yells at — Darryl Chalk — is not a person that Carell went to high school with. As Honda would have needed to get the permission from anyone who was in the yearbook adjacent to these celebrities as well to make the commercial possible, this is only fair.
To further show how just the celeb yearbook photos are real, you can see below that Carell's pic was placed with a different person next to him for a teaser commercial.
Business Insider wrote that this ad campaign will continue after the Super Bowl with other actors, musicians, and athletes being featured, which means you can look forward to seeing more adorably fresh-faced celebrities from Honda throughout 2017. And the celebs in the Super Bowl commercial are already taking to social media to share their amazing photos again.
As yearbook photos are generally considered embarrassing for anyone who isn't Robert Redford, I can't thank these famous people enough for unabashedly embracing nostalgia for the public's amusement during the Super Bowl and beyond.
