Remembering Apple's '1984,' the one Super Bowl ad that changed the culture

The suits were freaked out.

With Super Bowl XVIII less than a week away, "1984," the game commercial for the brand-new Macintosh personal computer made absolutely no sense to them. Worse, there wasn't even a picture of the Mac. And if they were confused, imagine a hundred million viewers?

So, they did what any board of directors would do under the circumstances: They chickened out.

Lee Clow of the ad agency Chiat/Day, creator of the now-notorious ad, and Apple boy wonder, Steve Jobs — no longer running the company he'd founded 10 years earlier, but still associated with it — were instructed to sell the time back to CBS. They agreed, but like two kids hatching a plan far from meddling adults, did nothing of the sort. After telling the board the network had rebuffed them, "1984" was forced to run as scheduled, deep in the third quarter of a blowout between the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins, on Jan. 22, 1984.

No one remembers the game. Everyone remembers the commercial.

Sunday's Super Bowl LX may yield an exception (unlikely), but after 60 game telecasts and thousands of other commercials, only one still truly stands out in a long line of the fungible and mostly forgettable — that endless product hustle typically filled with celebrities, jokey punch lines and questionable taste.

"1984" aired just once nationally, but that was enough to launch the still-nascent personal computer revolution into orbit, and Apple along with it.

If "1984" still remains the only Super Bowl ad to actually change both the culture and buying habits, the obvious question is why?

That watershed year was certainly a factor. In 1984, everything would seem bigger, bolder, brighter, brasher — Madonna's "Like a Virgin" at the VMAs, "Purple Rain," "Born in the USA," "Ghostbusters" and half a dozen other blockbusters. That literary source material was a factor too. George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (published 1949) had finally arrived on the calendar, along with a whole new meaning for "Big Brother is Watching You." IBM — "Big Blue" — was poised to take over personal computing, and Apple needed a strategy, or — failing that — at least a world-changing commercial.

 Thanks to luck and circumstance, it would get one. The circumstance (and luck) here is that Ridley Scott needed the work. He recalled in a long ago interview that after Jobs and Clow showed him the storyboards for "1984" he thought, "My God, they are mad." He took the job. 

To represent IBM, Scott used a denatured bluish tint, evoking his own "Blade Runner" from two years earlier. To build out the set of another classic, 1979's "Alien, he'd disassembled a pair of 747s, but never found any use for the engines. They were mounted on the set of "1984."

What did they symbolize? Who knew, but they added to that glandular dystopic-steam-punk vibe that Clow and Jobs had been looking for — of a world under the jackboot of Big Brother/IBM. 

Scott, who'd directed a few commercials by then, said he'd "always looked at each" of them as minimovies. Besides his own, the film he really wanted to get into these sixty seconds was 1936's "H.G. Wells' Things to Come," directed by Alexander Korda.

"Things to Come" was a grim Wellsian saga that anticipated the start of World War II, but Korda filled it with retro-future flourishes, a cool Art Deco set, and ended it all on an upbeat note. Technology had saved humanity from itself, and "1984" would promise the same. After all, this wasn't about the end of the world. This was about the beginning. 

His 60-second movie began with an antlike armada of workers shuffling lockstep down a long tube, into a Soviet-style brutalist auditorium, where a face on a giant TV screen (Orwell's famed "telescreen") looks down upon the mute, mindless minions:

" ... We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause," he says. (English actor David Graham of "Doctor Who" was Big Brother.)

Cue to a splash of color dashing down a long passageway, with the Thought Police in close pursuit. This young woman (English athlete and model Anya Taylor) clad in bright red short shorts then charges the screen, and with a mighty swing, heaves an Olympic hammer. Both Big Brother and screen explode in a dazzling white flash.

The kicker: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"

And why Super Bowl ads would never be the same again either.