What happens when you email Bill Murray after his Super Bowl ad

Bill Murray is looking ruff, and his emails are open.

The elusive Ghostbusters star launched a Super Bowl ad campaign for Yahoo where he looks into a mirror and sees himself as a dog. “Have you ever looked in the mirror and not seen yourself?” he asks in the ad. 

In an elaborate gimmick, Murray holds up a legal pad with an email address on it: Billhimself@yahoo.com. “I don’t think I need professional help, but a skilled amateur — maybe? Little help?”

What happens when you email Murray's address? More than you'd think.

Once you fire off your first email to the Groundhog Day star, you'll get an automatic response with a photo of the Murray-dog with a bizarre first-person message about being stuck in canine form.

“People ask, are you a cat person or a dog person? Dog person. And, now, literally a dog person,” part of the message reads. “The fear hits but I remember my neighbor, Dr. Gerry, a legendary veterinarian totally qualified to respond to any canine emergency.”

There's also a video attached, featuring Murray addressing the camera (seemingly into a smartphone) and explaining that he had an elevated heart rate, so he went to the emergency room — but there was a line around the block, and since he thinks he's a dog, he went to the vet instead.

Murray then says the vet has referred him somewhere else and asks readers to guess where. It doesn't matter what you type, though, because as long as you respond to that email, you'll receive a second one in a new thread.

The second email reveals that Murray is going to a pet psychic, “Platinum Pet Premonitions,” with a link to a website for the business. The actor says the site “seemed legit,” but if you click “Book your appointment today” on the page, the button text changes to “Fully booked!” and humiliatingly subjects you to hear the Yahoo yodel.

Murray also appears in a second video in this email, this time in the Platinum Pet Premonitions office.

“She went into her finding-mode, where she reached her hands out, and then recited every dog's name that there is, starting from A,” he says, recounting his experience with the psychic. He then reveals that the $99.99 cost of her service was actually per minute, and she just wasted 55 minutes of his time.

“What now? Email some advice, a poem, a recipe,” he writes.

If you respond to that second email, you'll get one final message from Murray. “So I turn to family,” he writes. “Brother Brian arrives on a moment's notice. Or should I say, comes when called? With him as my mirror, he looked back at me and saw what was missing. What I had been missing and couldn't see.”

Unsurprisingly, there's a third vertical video attached to this email, too. Murray turns the camera around to his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, who identifies the pooch. “I think it's Peppy, our dog who loved to chase cars until Dad took her upstate,” Doyle-Murray says.

Murray agrees with his brother and addresses the dog in the mirror. “This has been a really nice visit, but you gotta go away, don't ya? Take care of yourself,” Murray says as he turns the camera back to the mirror, which first shows the dog and then morphs back into the Groundhog Day actor. 

The video leaves you with more questions than answers, but Murray offers a little clarity in the text of the third email. “I never got to say goodbye to Peppy,” he writes. “Until today. What the heck, Super Bowl Sunday. It was Peppy I was seeing in the mirror. After all these years, she came back to say goodbye to me and to let me say goodbye to her. Maybe she liked me the best of all the kids.”

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Murray continues. “I suppose we should never be horrified by what we see in the mirror. Or maybe we should never wish to be content with what we see in the mirror. Take care.”

That's the end of the correspondence, no matter how many times you write back to Murray. So the whole endeavor was a full-circle journey for Murray to say goodbye to his childhood dog? Why does the actor still look human in all of the videos? Do either of the brothers understand the premise of the campaign, or is it just an improvised series of videos without consistent internal logic? Was the whole point of this to sell audiences on the idea of email?

We really don't know what to make of any of this, but email Billhimself@yahoo.com to see for yourself, if you must.

The commercial was co-written by Murray in collaboration with Doyle-Murray, and frequent collaborator Mitch Glazer. Watch it above.