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This year’s Super Bowl marks the return of the iconic Coors Light train, with LL Cool J and Lainey Wilson—as well as The O’Jays—along for the ride.
The original Silver Bullet Train debuted in 2005 and kept chugging through 2012 on the premise that overheated people everywhere should have access to a cold train of beer regardless of whether they were standing near tracks. While The Onion envisioned the disaster that such a train would wreak across the nation, ads posited that people from various walks of life—from commuters to hip-hop forefather/television detective Ice-T—could benefit from a trainful of cold, foamy refreshment.
This year, during the first half of Super Bowl 58, Coors Light teamed up with its creative partners at Droga5 to reinvent the train as a courier of “chill” and, naturally, cans of Coors Light. The 30-second ad’s opening sequence seems optimistic enough—suggesting even without their teams’ names or logos that fans of the Los Angeles Chargers and Washington Commanders could one day watch their teams in the Big Game—but it turns tense when the lone fan in gold and powder blue elicits sneers from his girlfriend’s host family in burgundy.
As if sensing the discomfort from its Rocky Mountain lair, the Coors Light “Chill Train” bursts from the craggy landscape—with the can-shaped turbine of its locomotive taking in external heat and expelling it as snow. In the 90-second extended cut, it rips past a rural gas station, miraculously placing a Coors Light in a customer’s hand and freezing a dog’s water bowl.
Laying tracks behind it (new to Coors Light train lore), it barrels through a white-picket suburb and freezes a robed man’s laundry to the line, leaving him a beer as an apology. As Wilson stands for a photo shoot in front of a backdrop at a Hollywood studio, the train rolls by and deposits a beer beneath her hat.
A couple in Adirondack chairs on a palm-shaded beach, sitting beside a bucket of long-necked clear bottles that certainly are not Corona, have their sand replaced with snow and bottles swapped for cans. A father giving away his daughter at an outdoor wedding greets the passing train with a single tear, which immediately freezes.
Finally, back in the tense two-story family room of an anonymous metropolitan area, the train crashes through the wall and reveals its conductor—LL Cool J—who leaves Coors Light and remembers that he has a song to play. Cue The O’Jays’ “Love Train.”
