Breaking News: Game of Thrones took over Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercial - News Paper

Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane battles Bud Light’s Bud Knight and it’s not Dilly Dilly.

HBO’s Game of Thrones’s eighth and final season is only two months away, and in its most recent efforts to hype up fans, the show appeared in a Bud Light commercial Sunday night, during the Super Bowl.

The commercial shows a king and a queen at a jousting event, merrily drinking Bud Lights and cheering on the Bud Knight. Moments later, however, the knight gets knocked off his horse by Gregor Clegane, the huge and notoriously violent fighter from the Game of Thrones show, who goes by the nickname the Mountain.

The Mountain is one of Game of Throne’s most terrifying characters — after the Whites, of course. He is a loyal servant of House Lannister, and has an ongoing feud with his brother, Sandor Clegane, who goes by the nickname the Hound. The last time Game of Thrones audiences saw the Mountain, he was living a half-dead, zombie-like existence, and was serving as Queen Cersei Lannister’s private body guard. He got to his Frankenstein-like state in season four, episode eight’s “The Mountain and the Viper,” when he became severely injured during a battle with Prince Oberyn of House Martell — a battle (spoiler alert) he won by gauging Oberyn’s eyes out.

The Bud Light commercial pokes fun at the eye-crushing of Prince Oberyn. In the commercial, after the Mountain knocks Dilly Dilly off the horse, he tromps right up to him and gouges his eyes our — although, unlike HBO, Bud Light spares the audience the gore, filling in the scene with gross sound effects and a screaming audience. A shadow then casts over the jousting stadium, and one of the dragons of Daenerys Targaryen shows up, lighting the entire place on fire.

The Super Bowl ad is part of the $20 million marketing campaign for the show’s final season, according to the Wall Street Journal, which debuts April 14. The Journal is calling the commercial “the biggest and boldest marketing tie-ins the AT&T Inc.-owned cable network has ever orchestrated.” Apparently the commercial had input from a director from the HBO show, and a few other ideas for the commercial were scrapped because the show was worried it would give too much of the season finale’s plot line away.

While this is the first time the Mountain himself has appeared in a Bud Light commercial, the company has been running it’s GoT-like “Dilly Dilly” campaign since 2017. The campaign is supposed to be a parody of the Game of Thrones world, and has scenes of medieval characters sitting around banquets or stone jail cells, enjoying a bottle of Bud Light and shouting “Dilly Dilly” (a joke on “cheers”).

That parent company Anheuser-Busch allowed HBO to take over one of its Super Bowl ads — and let the Mountain kill its beloved Bud Knight, nonetheless — speaks to the power of the HBO’s franchise, and the limits people will go for it. To invoke the teasing tagline of the season finale, it’s clear that people will do anything “for the Throne.”

from Vox - All http://bit.ly/2G93Kgb
Breaking News: Game of Thrones took over Bud Light’s Super Bowl commercial - News Paper