50 Years Ago, Up With People Changed Super Bowl Halftimes
Looking back at when a cheesy musical group of clean-cut youths took stage at football's premier event.
By Frederic J. Frommer
The first nine Super Bowls featured some great football, including stars such Joe Namath, Bart Starr, Larry Csonka, and Roger Staubach. But the halftime shows were an afterthought, typically featuring college marching bands.
That all changed 50 years ago, when the NFL took a leap by booking the musical ensemble Up With People for the halftime show at Super Bowl X.
Up With People, a cheesy musical group of clean-cut youths, was a far cry from this Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, which will be headlined by Bad Bunny. Still, it marked a change to musical acts, and the league would never return to the marching band format.
“In the run-up to the 1976 Super Bowl, the NFL decided to undertake a more ambitious halftime show,” author Jonathan Mahler wrote in a 2013 column for Bloomberg View. “During this era of cultural malaise,” he added, “the combination of the group’s upbeat message and youthful exuberance proved irresistible to pro football.”
Up With People’s performance, a bicentennial pageant at the Orange Bowl in Miami, was called “200 Years and Just a Baby: A Tribute to America’s Bicentennial.” The young men were decked out in turtlenecks and slacks; the women in conservative, monochromatic dresses. CBS’s NFL Today cast told viewers the act featured young people from 40 states and 17 countries. Up With People was founded in 1965 to perform community service and advance good will.
Their repertoire included “Good Time Neighborhood Band,” “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Philadelphia Freedom,” and “Rock Around the Clock.” As they finished their act with “America the Beautiful,” balloons were released in celebration.
CBS broadcaster Brent Musburger was thoroughly impressed.
“If you watch and listen to young people like that, and you get a lot of confidence in the next 200 years, folks,” he said, sitting between his NFL Today co-hosts Irv Cross and Phyllis George.
“The halftime entertainment featured a large group of exuberant, clean‐cut youths called ‘Up With People,’” the New York Times observed in a story the next day, “and even that slice of Bicentennial entertainment came off nicely in the safe style of mid‐think.” That was a reference to an announcer’s line about America: “Some folks say we’ve come a long way, others say we’ve got a long way to go — and you know, probably both are right”
The announcer also had this equally anodyne observation: “America is celebrating her 200th birthday – which isn’t very old, compared to the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa and Europe.”
The group then broke into its title song, belting out, “200 Years and just a baby. 200 years and just a child. … Someday, she’s going to be quite a lady.”
In that afternoon’s Super Bowl – yes, the NFL used to stage its marquee game during the day – the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Dallas Cowboys 21-17.
Up With People would perform at three more Super Bowls, attracting its share of mockery. In a 2009 story, for example, Time magazine wrote that in ’76, Up With People “began a cloying stretch of dominance that included four performances in 11 years.”
A 2016 New York Times story described the mid-70s transition from marching bands to Up With People this way: “Brass instruments gave way to turtlenecks and awkward dancing for a performance saluting the nation’s bicentennial, delivered by the educational group Up With People, who preached unity and progress.”
The Simpsons spoofed Up With People in a scene showing Homer Simpson grooving out to an act called “Hooray For Everything” on his car radio.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Hooray For Everything invites you to join them in a salute to the greatest hemisphere on Earth — the Western Hemisphere!” the announcer says. “The danciest hemisphere of all!” (Another Simpsons episode also parodied the act.)
Up With People did its last Super Bowl at the Superdome in 1986. By then, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was sick of the act, wrote Mahler, “reportedly telling his staff years earlier that there were three words he never wanted to hear again: Up, with and people. Still, the Uppies left their mark on the game. As campy as they may look now, they created the concept of the halftime show as a free-standing cultural event of its own.”
And in the Trump era, it’s also become a political event. Bad Bunny has been sharply critical of the president, and so has Green Day, which will perform the opening ceremony at the game. Trump, a huge sports fan, recently told the New York Post he won’t attend the Super Bowl. “I’m anti-them,” he said of those performers. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.”
Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other national publications. He is working on a book on ‘70s baseball.
I'm sharing these lyrics from memory so there might be a few mistakes. Here goes- Up up with people, you meet them wherever you go. Up up with people, they're the best kind of folks we know. If more people were for people all people everywhere, there'd be a lot more people to care about and a lot more people who care.
Trump, a huge sports fan, recently told the New York Post he won’t attend the Super Bowl.
That's reason enough to watch!