Bryant Gumbel And Katie Couric BMW Super Bowl Ad From 1994 To 2015: What Is ‘Internet’ Anyway? [Video]

There’s a new YouTube video going viral, one that hilariously shows co-hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric together back in 1994, when both are trying to figure out whether the @ sign means “at” or “about” or “around” — and what exactly this newfangled thing called the “Internet” was, especially as Gumbel skips right over the “dot” and simply says “com” instead. It’s like watching an episode of the Fine Brothers as they show older people the trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey or something. But in this new video, Gumbel and Couric pretend to be mystified by BMW’s new electric car, in the Super Bowl ad titled Super Bowl 2015: BMW Ad, uploaded to the Wall Street Journal YouTube account 19 hours ago. It’s a video that has already received more than 1,500 views — and having been published on January 26, it proves that folks who’ve never seen Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric from 1994 — including those who have — are loving this new commercial.

Sure, it’s not the heavy and important type of ad that tackles more important topics, as reported by the Inquisitr in this article titled Super Bowl Domestic Violence Commercial: Battered Woman Pretends To Order Pizza But Calls 911 Instead [Video], but Couric and Gumbel’s ad is catching attention nonetheless, especially because of that 1994 video snipped intro.

In the article titled “Exclusive: Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel discuss that time they discovered the Internet,” USA TODAY? reveals how the duo first felt when they were given an Internet website address to read on air, and Gumbel said reading “violence at NBC” sounded wrong. That’s when the hilarity ensued in looking back at the piece through our super tech-savvy 2015 eyes at the NBC hosts trying to figure out what the world wide web was all about.

“I wasn’t prepared to translate that as I was doing that little tease. That little mark with the ‘a’ and then the ring around it. What is Internet, anyway? What do you write to it like mail?”

“Internet is uh, that massive computer network. The one that’s becoming really big now. It came in really handy during the quake. You don’t need a phone line to operate it?”

“Apparently not.”

The original 1994: “Today“: “What is the Internet, Anyway?” YouTube video has gotten more than 1.6 million views, so it’s a brilliant move to have that snippet featured more than 20 years later in a Super Bowl 2015 commercial.

[Image via BMW Super Bowl ad]