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George Orwell 1984

February 3, 2012 by · Comments Off on George Orwell 1984 

George Orwell 1984, In 1984, Apple defined the Super Bowl Commercial as a cultural phenomenon. Prior to Super Bowl XVIII, nobody watched the game “just for the commercials” — but one epic TV spot, directed by sci-fi legend

Ridley Scott, changed all that. Read on for the inside story of the commercial that rocked the world of advertising, even though Apple’s Board of Directors didn’t want to run it at all.

Why 1984 Won’t Be Like 1984
The tagline “Why 1984 Won’t Be Like ’1984?” references George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, which envisioned a dystopian future, controlled by a televised “Big Brother.” The tagline was written by Brent Thomas and Steve Hayden of the ad firm Chiat\Day in 1982, and the pair tried to sell it to various companies (including Apple, for the Apple II computer) but were turned down repeatedly.

When Steve Jobs heard the pitch in 1983, he was sold — he saw the Macintosh as a “revolutionary” product, and wanted advertising to match. Jobs saw IBM as Big Brother, and wanted to position Apple as the world’s last chance to escape IBM’s domination of the personal computer industry. The Mac was scheduled to launch in late January of 1984, a week after the Super Bowl. IBM already held the nickname “Big Blue,” so the parallels, at least to Jobs, were too delicious to miss.

Thomas and Hayden wrote up the story of the ad: we see a world of mind-controlled, shuffling men all in gray, staring at a video screen showing the face of Big Brother droning on about “information purification directives.” A lone woman clad in vibrant red shorts and a white tank-top (bearing a Mac logo) runs from riot police, dashing up an aisle towards Big Brother.

Just before being snatched by the police, she flings a sledgehammer at Big Brother’s screen, smashing him just after he intones “We shall prevail!” Big Brother’s destruction frees the minds of the throng, who quite literally see the light, flooding their faces now that the screen is gone. A mere eight seconds before the one-minute ad concludes, a narrator briefly mentions the word “Macintosh,” in a restatement of that original tagline: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ’1984.’” An Apple logo is shown, and then we’re out — back to the game.

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