Look, you probably saw the show and noticed it straight anyway regardless, but just in case you didn’t, here are a bunch of people all making the same joke: that Rihanna’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl tonight looked just like a Smash Bros. stage.
To be fair, it’s not really a joke. More a case of just stating the clearly obvious. All that was missing some some backup dancer getting punched into space.
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In case you want to read more about the performance itself—one of the all-time great Super Bowl halftime shows—The AV Club have some coverage you can check out:
As a musician, Rihanna’s greatest strength—the thing that most sets her apart from her peers—has always been her catalog. Other artists may be better singers or dancers, but, besides Mariah Carey, no living artist has more number-one hits than Rihanna. It makes sense that Team Rih would try to cram as many of these songs into her 13-minute Super Bowl Halftime Show set as possible—unfortunately, the trip down memory lane came at the expense of other kinds of showmanship.
Rihanna opened the set high above the field, standing on one of many eye-popping floating stages, powering through her anthemic “Bitch Better Have My Money.” This was easily the best moment of her performance, and the stage stunned visually. Plenty of other artists have recently taken to the sky during their time at the Super Bowl, but none used the space in such a deliberate way. Rih flashed a smirk with all the cockiness we’ve come to expect from someone who’s dubbed herself “Bad Girl Riri”—a welcome reminder of what we’ve missed in the past seven years without a Rihanna album.