Hands down the greatest commercial ever made. I saw it fresh during the '85 Super Bowl and saw the best thing up to then on TV in that minute except for Neil Armstrong standing on the Moon.
Apple's introduction of the Mac via George Orwell imagery.
You had to have seen it fresh to grasp the emotion of the paradigm shift it provided when it ended.
Text of "1984"
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/1984.html
http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/adclass/1984_mac_ad.html#5
Quote:The half-time of the 1984 Super Bowl featured a 45 second ad that would be declared in 1995 the best ad of the last 50 years5. The commercial, directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, 1979, and Blade Runner, 1982) for the Apple Corporation, announced the imminent arrival of the Macintosh computer. The ad cost $1.6 million to produce, and Apple Corporation paid $500,000 for the one-minute time slot in which it ran. It ran only once.
The commercial is elegant, filmic, and a powerful cinematic narrative. It contains allusions to legendary films and cultural myths, and sets in place a trajectory involving issues of balance between the organic and inorganic, between nature and culture that I follow until 1995.
As the ad begins, excess is very much in evidence. The hall is monumental, the line of marchers/workers appears endless. The air is thick with smog , a bluish-gray haze overlaying everything, reminiscent of Scott's vision of the future Los Angeles in Blade Runner; the pallor and sickliness of the workers are accentuated. The scenario invokes the George Orwell novel, 1984; a Big Brother figure ceaselessly intones the slogans of Newspeak, while the public masses appear automatized by the rigidly controlled totalitarian.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/adclass/1984.apple_ad.mov
read on here:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/adclass/1984_mac_ad.html#5
