During the 1984 Super Bowl, while the Los Angeles Raiders pummeled the Washington Redskins in a 38-9 victory, an up-and-coming tech company stunned the nation with a cutting-edge commercial based on George Orwell's "1984."
That commercial, directed for Macintosh by renowned filmaker Ridley Scott, introduced Macs to the world and is often cited as a game-changer in tech marketing.
But that wasn't the end of the iconic commercial, according to Network World: Macintosh invested $50,000 to produce a sequel, a 9-minute epic ad called "1944," which stars Steve Jobs as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Paul McNamara from Network World obtained the long-lost commercial from Craig Elliot, who worked for Apple from 1985 until 1996 before starting his own tech company two blocks away.
Elliott said the short film was first screened at a company meeting in Hawaii in 1984 as part of an effort to rally the sales team, and that while snippets of the film have been shown at private events, he's "never seen [the whole film] anywhere else."
In the commercial, which features professional actors as well as company heads like Marketing VP Mike Murray, shows underdog Macintosh's fight against monolithic IBM, whose boring products are turning office workers everywhere into drones.
Head over to Network World to check out the full film.
Here's the clip of Jobs as FDR:
And here's the original 1984 commercial:
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