1984 - page 2

Steve Jobs dressing up as Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rally Apple’s troops is one of the weirdest bits of ephemera about Apple history.

The internal video — which followed Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial and was meant to motivate Apple’s international sales force — features Jobs doing a bizarre caricature of the beloved four-term president that borrowed just as much from FDR’s real mannerisms as it did from Burgess Meredith’s interpretation of the Penguin.

How the heck did something this weird come about?

Did you know that Steve Jobs played the role of FDR in a colossal World War II styled Apple commercial? We’ve seen glimpses of Steve in his FDR costume from a video made to celebrate Jobs’s 30th birthday, but we never knew the context of why Jobs was dressed up like the former-U.S. President until now.

After the success of their 1984 Super Bowl commercial, Apple created a broad-cast quality production titled “1944” that was designed to motivate Apple’s international sales force during a 1984 company meeting in Hawaii. Apple supposedly spent $50,000 on the production that used a mix of professional actors alongside prominent Apple figures. The 9-minute commericial uses a World War II theme to focus on the battle between Apple and IBM, with El Jobso taking up the mantle of FDR. The entire video is pretty bizarre and terribly corny, but definitely worth watching.

Apple’s infamous 1984 advertising campaign for the original Macintosh needs little introduction from myself. The one-minute clip, which was inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel and depicts IBM users as mindless followers, was a huge success. So much so that the marketing guru behind it, Regis McKenna, believes it was more successful than the Macintosh itself.

Apple launched its new ad campaign for the iPad 2 Saturday based on its founding philosophy of bringing technology to the masses.

Proving that fact is always more interesting than fiction, ad man Steve Hayden remembers the making of Apple’s 1984 ad in AdWeek this week.

Marking the 27th anniversary, Hayden describes the utterly chaotic process behind the making of what’s been called “the best TV commercial ever.” Everyone hated it, and no one wanted it to run except Steve Wozniak, who offered to pay half the costs himself.

The first version of the spot was more Jetsons than Metropolis. The intention was to remove people’s fears of technology at a time when owning your own computer made about as much sense as owning your own cruise missile. We wanted to democratize technology, telling people that the power was now literally in their hands.

AdWeek: ‘1984’: As Good as It Gets

Back in 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with its famous 1984 Superbowl ad. Now Motorola is invoking some of the same ideas to promote its Xoom tablet, but this time, Apple is Big Brother.

Motorola’s new Superbowl Ad , “Goodbye 1984,” says that 2011 looks a lot like 1984:

One authority. One design. One way to work.

It’s time for more choices. It’s time to explore. It’s time to live a free life.

Learn more about Motorola XOOM: https://moto.ly/xoom

The ad is pretty bare-bones, and it’s not clear whether it will run during the Superbowl or is just a teaser or a trial balloon.

Funny how often Apple is compared to Big Brother these days. Over the weekend, The New York Times invoked Microsoft in its heyday with its market-crushing “platform” — a position Apple finds itself in now, says the Times.

Here’s Motorola’s ad below, and Apple’s original 1984, just for comparison purposes.