1984 (1984)

Directed by

Ridley Scott

Genre

advertising

Country

United States

Runtime

1 min

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A woman runs through a dark industrial facility carrying a large hammer. She throws it at a screen showing a giant face giving a speech. The commercial suggests the destruction of conformity and the arrival of the Macintosh computer.

ambiguousstylizeddystopianadrenalinedefiantsuspensefulminimalist

What happens

"1984" is an American television commercial that introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer. It was conceived by Steve Hayden, Brent Thomas, and Lee Clow at Chiat/Day, produced by New York production company Fairbanks Films, and directed by Ridley Scott. The ad was a reference to George Orwell's noted 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother". English athlete Anya Major performed as the unnamed heroine and David Graham as Big Brother. In the US, it first aired in 10 local outlets, including Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chiat/Day ran the ad on December 31, 1983, at the last possible break before midnight on KMVT, so that the advertisement qualified for the 1984 Clio Awards. Its second televised airing, and only US national airing, was on January 22, 1984, during a break in the third quarter of CBS's telecast of Super Bowl XVIII. In one interpretation of the commercial, "1984" used the unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a stylized line drawing of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from "conformity" (Big Brother). Originally a subject of contention within Apple, it has subsequently been called a watershed event and a masterpiece in advertising. In 1995, the Clio Awards added it to its Hall of Fame, and Advertising Age placed it on the top of its list of 50 greatest commercials. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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