The Super Bowl is on Sunday, and one of the most acclaimed Super Bowl ads of all time is Apple “1984.” It introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer for the first time. Its only daytime broadcast was on Jan. 22, 1984 during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.
The Estate of George Orwell considered the commercial to be a flagrant copyright infringement and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Apple and its ad agency Chiat-Day in April 1984, according to Wikipedia. Viewers generally saw the Big Brother target of the Apple ad as being IBM and later Microsoft. An interesting article about the ad, from the Dartmouth Law Journal, is here.
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Jeff,
Oh, those were the good old days. Just look at the censorship we have today from all of the left-wing crazies who control our media: http://visiontoamerica.org/story/-fox-rejects-john-316-super-bowl-ad.html
John
My son was five in 84 and LIKELY in the TeeVee area with dad when the ad ran. Never had a PC IN THE HOUSE (not even the IBM PEANUT friends were getting). After college my son went directly to work the next day at APPLE.
Wonder if it had an impact on his future beyond the wow factor!
The one Super Bowl ad that stands out, for some sappy sentimental reason, is the vision of the Budweiser Clydesdales, trotting out onto the snowy banks of the Hudson and kneeling before the NYC skyline, absent the recently destroyed Trade Towers.
Corporate bilge notwithstanding, it was just so sweet.
Judith,
Here is that ad. Thanks for reminding all of us:
John,
Your faith and mine differ.
But really, with all the tattoos we see, simply everywhere, why would we not allow this young man to wear a faith code on his warrior regalia?
Do not all the pro ballgame leagues sport emblems?
This is silly.
Let the lad fly his colors.
It’s just a game, FCS.
Here is an very uneventful Budweiser commercial in our old town Telluride. Our business was in the lighting of the street shot.
Our deli/ ice cream shop basically the entire street got shut down for a day so they could shoot this commercial without any reimbursements.