Ridley Scott

January 17, 1984: A week before its famous airing during Super Bowl XVIII, Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial debuts as a trailer in movie theaters. To hype its revolutionary new Macintosh computer, Apple buys several months of promotion from theatrical ad distributor ScreenVision.

Cupertino’s sci-fi-tinged “1984” spot — which depicts a sledgehammer-wielding freedom fighter taking on a Big Brother figure supposed to represent IBM — gets such a favorable audience reaction that some theater owners continue to roll the ad after Apple’s contract ends.

No Apple TV+ film won an Academy Award on Sunday, despite 10 nominations for Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon — including Best Picture — and three for Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon.

Despite the final results, Apple made it clear that it is honored to be nominated. And both films have drawn large audiences since they debuted on Apple’s streaming service.

Apple TV+ took its biggest gambles this year as a distributor of theatrical features with gargantuan budgets and run times to match, hoping that America will want to return to the epics of yesteryear in time for the holidays.

With Martin Scorsese’s heartbreaking Killers of the Flower Moon garnering headlines and climbing toward recouping its budget, here comes Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. The Apple Original biopic about the diminutive French emperor — in theaters now, and coming to Apple’s streaming service at some point in the future — proves Apple TV+ is a safe bet for good movies.

Coupling unfliniching violence with a keen sense of the absurd, it’s one of Scott’s finest films.

Ridley Scott’s epic film Napoleon may come in a shorter theatrical release at 2 hours and 38 minutes as well as a director’s cut of 4 hours and 10 minutes (as of its last editing), the legendary director said. He suggested the long one will air on Apple TV+ after the short one’s theatrical release.

Ridley Scott will reportedly direct an epic starring Joaquin Phoenix as French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Kitbag will be produced by Apple and shown on Apple TV+.

Ridley Scott, who directed Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl TV advertisement, is less than pleased with the parody version Epic Games released last month.

The original ad introduced the Apple Macintosh to the world. Epic Games’ version seeks to portray itself as the underdog in a legal fight with Apple over App Store policies.

Shortly after Fortnite was unceremoniously ejected from the App Store Thursday, Epic Games dropped a — no pun intended — epic parody video depicting Apple as the same dystopian Big Brother it had railed against in its famous Nineteen Eighty-Four commercial for the original Macintosh.

But this is far from the first time Apple’s sledgehammer-tossing, Ridley Scott-directed Mac ad has been spoofed. Here are five more times that shows or companies satirized the imagery of what might be Apple’s best-known advert.

Is this a new era of marketing directly to stoners?

In Ben & Jerry’s new ad for its in-shop confection, the Brrr-ito, a young woman wearing an ice cream server’s uniform runs into a room of slack-jawed young men staring at a screen showing a boring old ice cream bar.

What happens next should be no surprise to those of you who remember Ridley Scott’s famous ad for Apple in 1984 introducing the Mac.

From sledgehammer-tossing freedom fighters to misunderstood teenagers at Christmas, Apple’s TV commercials have hit us with some truly iconic imagery over the years. But when a company has been around since the 1970s, it’s no great surprise that a select few ads would slip our collective memory.

After scouring through hundreds of big-time commercials and tiny TV spots that promoted Cupertino’s products over the years, here are our picks for the Apple advertisements that time forgot. All of them are worthy of a second look — and almost all of them for the right reasons.

Apple was notably absent from the Super Bowl ad slots Sunday, but a new video touting the Mac’s transformative power is quickly making Cupertino the most talked-about company the morning after the big game. The impressive clip continues the Mac’s 30th-anniversary celebration, and it was shot entirely on iPhones in 15 locations across five continents.