Everybody remembers Apple’s remarkable George Orwell-inspired 1984 Super Bowl ad. It’s still talked about as one of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time. But buried in the company’s marketing vault is another landmark video from the same year, and it may be even better. It wasn’t inspired by Orwell. It was inspired by Dan Aykroyd.
The ad is called BlueBusters (see video below), and it’s a riff on Aykroyd’s parapsychology comedy hit Ghostbusters, featuring Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver, and a giant marshmallow man.
In Apple’s ad, the evil spirits of Ghostbusters are replaced by a green-slime-oozing, Borg-like IBM force, and the ghost-busting parapsychologists are swapped for Mac-toting geeks who blast away boxes and boxes of IBM computers. IBM, you see, has long been known as Big Blue.
As a bonus, the ad features what could arguably be called the first Apple Store. About a minute into the video, a businessman has his computer store overrun by Big Blue meanies. First, the IBM types give him peanuts (BOOM! Take that, IBM!), and then they stock his store with countless Big Blue boxes. But then they’re all magically Blue-Busted into Macintosh equipment!
To further cement Apple’s reputation for attention to detail and coolness, the goofy BlueBusters song is apparently sung by Ray Parker, Jr., the same guy who performed the original Ghostbusters song. “When the big machine / Wants to take control? Who can you call?” he sings. “Blue Busters!”
Plus Blue Busters features a cameo from Woz. Hard to top that.
Sure, it’s shot as a long slide show, and it doesn’t have the production values or revolutionary intensity of the 1984 ad, but we think Apple was playing the long game here. A century from now, when people try to remember cultural reference points from the 20th century, who’re they gonna call? Airstrip One… or Ghostbusters?
On second thought, maybe they were trying to get a few laughs at their 1984 Hawaiian international sales meeting.
