Kick off Super Sunday with 17 sci-fi and fantasy Super Bowl commercials

The Super Bowl advertising machine has been going strong for the past four decades, and our love of sci-fi, fantasy and horror is ingrained in the clever brains of marketing agencies around the globe.  Ever since Apple's iconic 1984 Macintosh spot, directed by Ridley Scott for Super Bowl XVIII, the geeky realms we inhabit have been grist for the marketing mill in the high-stakes gamble of dropping millions for a 30-second event commercial.

Sunday's NFL Championship Game between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers will be viewed by a global audience of a billion people before the final snap.  That's a lot of consumer eyes glued to the tube!

A few years back we rounded up a collection of sci-fi themed Super Bowl commercials to distract viewers from all the gridiron action, and now we're back to fill in the best nerdy ads from 2013 to the present.  While some years were leaner than others, we discovered a mad rush of instant classics, with corporations using flying saucers, bug-eyed aliens, white-winged angels, apocalyptic outlaws, sarcastic wizards, The Matrix's Morpheus, ALF, robot spokesmodels, space babies, pink rocketships, Back to the Future's DeLorean, Arthur C. Clarke, Pac-Man and even frozen Scott Baio in a cryo-cell to hawk their multitude of goods and products.

Warm up that queso dip and tell us which of these 17 ambitious ads spikes the ball in the endzone.