"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."
"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."
Board executives panicked about the unintelligible "1984" Super Bowl commercial and its lack of Macintosh imagery. Lee Clow and Steve Jobs were ordered to sell the airtime back to CBS but instead misled the board and kept the spot. The commercial aired during the third quarter of the Raiders-Redskins blowout on Jan. 22, 1984. The game faded from memory while the ad became iconic. The single national airing propelled the personal computer revolution and elevated Apple. The commercial resonated with a culture primed by bold 1984 pop moments and drew on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four for thematic power.
Read at Newsday
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