SUPER BOWL XXVIII / Cowboys 30, Buffalo Bills 13 : SPOTLIGHT : AND NOW A WORD FROM YOUR SPONSORS

A blue-ribbon panel of Times editors and reporters, consumers all, rated the best commercials of this Super Bowl.

1. First place goes to the two-part Steve Martin shoe commercial, where he discovers that Michael Jordan has faked his retirement.

2. Next is the fast-food commercial starring Charles Barkley, Jordan and Larry Bird. Barkley wants to play with the retired ones, but they won’t let him.

3. The soft-drink commercial in which many of today’s yuppies return to Woodstock for the anniversary of the famous concert. Incredibly clever and uncomfortably real.

4. Cindy Crawford is put into a soft-drink deprivation tank by scientist Kramer of “Seinfeld” for one month and comes out Rodney Dangerfield.

5. Two chimps drink competing soft drinks for six weeks and come out with different personalities.

Commercials 3, 4 and 5, all made by the same soft-drink company, collectively would rank first.

The most disappointing was the potato-chip commercial with Dan Quayle. In the commercial, some kid in the nosebleed section offers each person in the row in front of him that the person can’t eat just one chip. The bet is for the better seat. Well, the kid works his little scam all the way to the first row, where he encounters the former vice president. This is where the commercial fails. The kid makes the same bet with the ex-VP. But what he should have said was: “Bet, you can’t spell potato (chip).” To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, circa 1988, we know good commercials and that was no good commercial.