Long before Batesville brothers Joe and Dave Herbert crashed the Super Bowl with their low-budget Doritos commercial, they were just kids who liked to borrow their parents' video recorder and tape themselves "being idiots."

"We were just playing around, never thinking it would lead to anything big," said Joe, 33. "The both of us have this kind of creativity bug that just didn't stop."

The unemployed brothers beat out 51 big-budget advertisers, creating the highest-rated commercial to air during the Super Bowl on Sunday. They topped USA Today's annual Super Bowl Ad Meter poll and received $1 million for winning Doritos maker Frito-Lay's user-submitted online advertisement contest.

MORE SUPER BOWL ADS: Click here to view all of the Super Bowl ads.

PREVIOUS SUBMISSIONS: Click here to watch The Herbert's 2007 submission "Duct Tape" | and "The Ultimatum".

Theirs is an unlikely story -- more unlikely even than the Arizona Cardinals making it to the Super Bowl.

The brothers spent $2,000 on their "Free Doritos" commercial, which features a guy shattering an office vending machine full of Doritos with a crystal ball. Other companies, such as Anheuser-Busch, Cars.com and Pepsi, spent millions of dollars on their ads.

The pair grew up in the tiny town of West Harrison, where they would videotape their antics and edit them with two VCRs. "Us being idiots is what we shot," Joe said. "My brother had a fight with a tree and lost."

Now, they live with their families in Batesville, a slightly bigger town in southeastern Indiana that's known mostly as the home of Batesville Casket Co.

Neither Herbert has formal training in filmmaking.

Dave, 32, who has a bachelor's degree in economics from Marietta College in Ohio, managed a sports complex owned by his parents until they sold it about a year ago. Joe, who has a degree in visual communications design from Purdue University, was a Web site designer and owned his own firm until he sold it a few years ago.

"We had a short opportunity to follow a dream and pursue this," Joe said. "We never thought we'd be this successful this fast."

Joe and Dave, the oldest of five brothers, rekindled their childhood dream about five years ago.

They started meeting once a week to research filmmaking and cinematic technique. It was a hobby at first. But then, after a year, they'd written a script.

"We thought it was too good for us to act in it," Joe said half-seriously.

It also would've been too tough to shoot, produce and edit without any hands-on experience -- except for using their parents' video recorder, of course.

So, the brothers decided to take a step back. They settled on 10 "practice" films based on the world's 10 funniest jokes. They called the series "Ha!"

Along the way, the Herberts met several people in the filmmaking business, including comedians they later would recruit to star in the "Free Doritos" commercial.

The Herberts took their first crack at creating a Doritos commercial in 2007, the first year of the Frito-Lay-sponsored contest.

Out of hundreds of entries, their two videos placed fifth and eighth among online voters in 2007 -- not good enough to air during the Super Bowl but good enough to gain fame on YouTube.

Then came "Free Doritos."

"Two years later, we came back and made the top five," Dave said.

The commercial was one of two user-created Doritos ads to air Sunday. But the Herberts' commercial, shot at a YMCA, outranked ads for Budweiser, which has ruled USA Today's poll for a decade.

Dave said their inspiration for "Free Doritos" was simply "trying to think funny things." He and his four brothers have always been amateur comedians, he said, and ideas usually come from their conversations.

Herbert brothers Pete and Matt helped Dave and Joe produce Sunday's commercial. The fifth brother, Josh, is serving in the military in Iraq.

Ann Mukherjee, group vice president at Frito-Lay, said the company will have an "ongoing relationship" with the Herberts.

But the brothers also have other projects in the works.

They're scoping out ways to produce a feature film and, later this month, they plan to unveil a board game they've developed called "Triviathon." It's in production now and is due out in July.

"We went into debt trying to build a prototype of the game. Today," Joe said of the $1 million prize from Frito-Lay, "that debt was wiped clean."

Call Star reporter Erika D. Smith at (317) 444-6424.