“Look at them sideburns! He looks like a girl! Now, Johnny Unitas — there’s a haircut you can set your watch to!”

Twenty-seven years after Super Bowl III, the anthologic pop-culture encyclopedia provided by The Simpsons would offer its take on the game through the always-crochety Grampa Simpson, then just a middle-aged, beer-swilling layabout “stuck in his button-down, plastic-fantastic Madison Avenue scene.”

Behind many jokes there is an element of truth, and so it went with this one. Under center, Joe Namath was a Western-Pa. bred, Bear Bryant-molded, tough-guy quarterback who played through pain that would felled many a player. But his white shoes, Fu Manchu, sideburns, pantyhose commercicals and bar ownership spoke otherwise — especially when contrasted with Unitas, who was still a couple of years away from his ’70s-appropriate moptop. Namath was in equal coiffed contrast with the Colts’ starter that day, Earl Morrall, who would keep his crew cut right into the mid-1970s and beyond.

Which brings us to the highlight film itself, a fairly bold experiment as far as Super Bowl highlight films go that is a tad curious for a game that turned out to be a crucial turning point in pro football’s annals. It takes five minutes and 29 seconds in the 23-minute film until we are actually taken to game day; we are treated to a build-up that underscores the contrast between the quarterbacks and teams, with a song called Broadway Joe by a group called the “Super Chicks,” who sound like high-school cheerleaders.

(Someone who was supposedly a countercultural hero probably should have been feted with a song that sounded less like the Dixie Cups and more like Jefferson Airplane. Although, at first, I thought the song closed with “No one else can score like Broadway Joe,” which could be interpreted in multiple manners, and fit in with a verse earlier in the song that called him a “swinging ladies man.” Alas for the lecherous among us, the song closed with “No one else can throw like Broadway Joe.” But I digress.)

In a word, this highlight film is “different.” At the least, it’s a film of its age — daring and presented in a manner that seeks not only to break the mold, but shatter it. I’m sure that this probably falls into a the love-it-or-hate-it pile for most; I can’t be so decisive because while this has never been one that I would repeatedly watch after taping it off of ESPN as a kid, I admire the effort and the filmmaking risks that Steve Sabol takes here, especially considering the weight of the game and the fact that the championship-game highlight film was still a fairly nascent concept, with NFL Films just a few short years removed from Ed Sabol’s original Blair Motion Pictures incarnation.

It was a chance worth taking … although it falls short of representing the game’s place in history.

BEST NARRATION: “Two champions on a Sunday afternoon. A new one as a quarterback. An old one as a man.”

RATING:

Perhaps a scosh too much is made of the quarterback storyline at the expense of the efforts of Matt Snell and George Sauer, who were probably at least as responsible for the Jets’ win than the Hall of Fame quarterback himself, but whose efforts have been relegated to the ashbin of history because of the overarching storyline of Namath’s “guarantee.”

You hear the narrator and think, “Well, he sounds sort of like John Facenda … maybe he had a cold on the day of the recording session? Yeah, that must be it.”

Wrong.

Here sits the only one of the first 18 Super Bowl highlight films to lack the stentorian narration of NFL Films’ “Voice of God,” replaced by William Woodson, who is perhaps best known for providing the voiceover to the opening of the TV version of The Odd Couple.

Da duh da duh da duh … da da duh, da da duh duuuuh … Oh, sorry ’bout that, dear reader.

This film fits into a pattern that would occasionally be repeated by highlight films to follow — the Super Bowl as anticlimax. Give the score first, then craft the storyline. It’s an appropriate choice given that this game came two weeks after the Green Bay Packers won arguably the greatest game of the 1960s, if not the entire 20th century, in the Ice Bowl (although partisans of the old Baltimore Colts and the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills would certainly vouch for other duels ranking higher).

This is also the film where Packers guard Jerry Kramer recounts a story for the locker room in which his team agreed to “play the last 30 (minutes) for the old man,” which dwarfs all other storylines just as Vince Lombardi’s Packers towered over the rest of the NFL.

BEST NARRATION: “Right from the beginning of the game, there was a sense of superior Packer power grown strong, not fat, on history.”

RATING:

Wonderful cinematography for its time, particularly in the iconic shot of Lombardi leaving the field after what turned out to be his final game stalking the Packers sidelines. Facenda is all that’s missing.

In 2007, we are but jaded observers of sports on television. Graphics tell us everything we could possibly need to know at each juncture of a game, because God forbid we should have to wait for the next day’s newspaper. Multiple angles, frame-by-frame reviews of close calls, video-game simulations of how a team runs its base defense — these aren’t merely fancy accoutrements of the average sports broadcast; they are expected and, frankly, demanded by the viewer.

Forty years ago, such notions were foreign. The casual observer might have reacted to these ideas as Dr. Emmett Brown when Marty McFly told him that Ronald Reagan was President in 1985.

So in this Tex Maule-written highlight film entitled “The Spectacle of a Sport,” one phrase symbolizes all that could fascinate the viewer in 1967 — “super slow motion.”

The words are mentioned twice; the technique is used throughout the film, which completely veers from the chronology of the game to focus on themes — first the Kansas City Chiefs’ success and failure, then later the same for the Green Bay Packers. The historical significance is of weight here, not the relatively pedestrian game itself, and the film appropriately reflects this, even while laboring to keep the 30,000 empty seats at the Los Angeles Coliseum out of the frame. It was ultimately a futile effort; the one-third-empty Coliseum was impossible to shroud without culling extras from off the streets for crowd shots — which completely and obviously goes against the very concept of a documentary.

As a result, the traipses into the stands are never of wide shots, but always of individuals … fans who traveled from the Midwest, Danny Thomas, Kirk Douglas and some other celebrities, who, frankly, I can’t recognize, being born nine years after this game took place.

BEST NARRATION: “The big question which had troubled the football world for seven years was answered.” … “(Max) McGee fielded his first pass like Willie Mays, and went on from there.” … “On another day, in another year, it will surely be the turn of the AFL. But this spectacle of a sport belonged to Green Bay.”

RATING:

Without the super-slow motion, this might have been a seven-minute highlight film. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But it might well have been trimmed in half. The soundtrack gives the piece a boost; the music sounds like it’s yanked from a Quinn Martin production, but it works.

The Broncos aren’t in the Super Bowl. We’re not in Miami covering it; our Bowl of note was the Senior Bowl, which we chronicled last week and shot several hours of video for pieces you’ll see on DenverBroncos.com in the weeks leading up to the 2007 NFL Draft.

So how can we commemorate the game? It is, after all, the subject of discussion for football fans from Ketchikan to Key West and beyond.

For that answer, I looked back to my childhood, which at this time of year saw me plan afternoons around watching ESPN’s airing of the John Facenda-narrated films, complete with an introduction offered by the venerable Jim Simpson, voice of virtually everything on the fledgling sports network in those days — college football, USFL and even a stint as Dick Vitale’s first consistent broadcast partner.

I’ve watched these films way too often — and that was before the Super Bowl DVD set came into my life. Forty Super Bowls, 20 DVDs, one box set. It’s also been a while since I’ve utilized all the film-study courses I took in college, and I so rarely have the chance to use anything I learned inside a classroom setting that even the faintest connection to a lecture lesson is one to seize.

Seven days, 40 Super Bowl highlight reviews.

Let me preface this forthcoming analysis with this caveat: For the football devotee, each of these films is worth watching, even Super Bowl XVIII, the worst NFL memory of my younger and more vulnerable years. Even a one-star rating — or in this exercise, a one-Lombardi Trophy rating — still renders a film worthy of a half-hour of one’s time, such is the collective quality of the work from the gang in Mount Laurel, N.J.

So why do this? Because I haven’t seen anything like this on the Internet, and these 40 works are worthy of extra attention — and a closer look beyond the perfunctory glance up at ESPN from behind a barstool during a lunch excursion.

That being said, off we go …