Hyundai enlists Flaming Lips for Super Bowl ad

We previewed a couple of Hyundai's Super Bowl spots -- focused largely on speed and power -- earlier in the week. The Sonata ad was a trifle of pedestrian whimsy, while the Genesis sedan R-Spec spot grated, grated and grated some more.

Now, with the kickoff looming, the Korean automaker's loosed its marquee ad, promoting the 2013 Santa Fe, upon the YouTubifying unwashed. Featuring veteran experimentalists the Flaming Lips, the clip tracks an ordinary family as they engage in extraordinary activities, with Oklahoma's most acid-damaged sons popping up at points along the way.

Most notably, frontman Wayne Coyne seems to have a permanent place at the kitchen table, swingin' on the flippity-flop in the role of some unnamed beatific, mischievous uncle.

The Lips wrote a new track, entitled “Sun Blows Up Today” for the ad -- take that, cover-slinging Jimmy Cliff! -- which is available via iTunes as of right now.

The ad itself is fun and engaging, if a bit slick and pat. The one real black mark is that some agency-type forced voiceover-artist Jeff Bridges to use the dead-horse adjective “epic” in the kicker. Hyundai, it's twenty-thirteeeeeen, dudes. Epic's epoch is extra over.

By Davey G. Johnson