Hoda Kotb, Savannah Guthrie and the rest of the Today anchors debuted an extremely fun Super Bowl commercial ahead of the big game on Friday February 11. The commercial featured all of the show’s anchors back in the 1970s in a classroom in the spot for the She Can STEM campaign for Ad Council, which hopes to inspire girls, non-binary kids, and trans youth to stay in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.
The commercial featured Hoda and Savannah wrapping up an interview with a group of inspiring women in STEM fields, as Savannah tells her co-host that she “wish[es] they had those kind of cool careers for women when we were growing up,” as it quickly turned to a classroom setting with the anchors dressed in school kid clothes. They were also wearing hairstyles more akin to the 70s, like Hoda and Savannah wearing pigtails, while Carson Daly had a wig with longer hair, and Al Roker and Craig Melvin both had afros. Even though their hair was different, and they were dressed like kids, Carson made a quip about how all the hosts looked almost exactly the same in the fantasy. “In this flashback, we’re all the same age?” he asked.
After Hoda threw a crumpled up paper ball at Carson, the teacher asked the students what they wanted to be when they got older, and the girls in the class raised their hands to share science-based fields, like making immersive video games (which Craig mentioned how he “love[s] the arcade”) or 3-D printing (which Hoda said, “3-D! Like those glasses we wear in the movies”) or analyzing data in the cloud. Of course some of the Today hosts had hilarious responses, like Savannah who asked for extra credit if she named two jobs. Al played on his real life job when he announced, “I want to be a meteor!” When the girl sitting behind tried to correct him and say “meteorologist,” he said, “No.”
As the commercial ended, the words “STEM has come a long way” flashed across the screen, and the ad encouraged people to go to the She Can STEM website. Before it completely ended though, Carson did get one quip in how he would’ve been too young to really partake in the flashback. “For the record, I was a baby in the 70s,” he said. He was born in 1973, so he would’ve been younger than most of his Today co-hosts (besides Craig, who was born in 1979).