Steve Jobs was many things. He was a visionary, a leader, a businessman, a designer, a showman. And at one point, in the mid-1980s, he was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In those days, Apple and its founder portrayed themselves as the forces of good in a world dominated by the evil IBM empire. Famously, with its 1984 Super Bowl ad, the company pegged IBM as Big Brother and the new Apple Macintosh as a hammer-throwing blonde woman who would bring him down. In an internal company video called BlueBusters -- meant to fire up its sales staff -- Apple was the computer industry's answer to Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and the rest of the Ghostbusters, with IBM's PCs cast as the horrifying, slime-covered ghosts. And then came the World War II parody.
Yes, IBM was the Germans. Apple was the Allies. And Steve Jobs was FDR, complete with cigarette and upturned cigarette holder. You can see his star turn in the clip above, just part of a sweeping sales film that plays out like a mini version of The Longest Day.
>'Your battle will be long. It will hard, but it will be won. I am sure your victory will be great. Insanely great.'
Steve Jobs as FDR
The film was meant to boost internal morale. It came at time when the Macintosh was facing a post-launch malaise. "The Macintosh made a huge splash and got a lot attention, and then it stalled because there wasn’t a lot of software," says Mike Markman, a freelance producer at the time who'd later become Apple's worldwide advertising director. "It was really a pain to work with the machine -- as much as everyone loved it." Sales -- and Apple's sales reps -- were depressed, so Apple rallied the troops with a WWII parody.
The eight-minute black-and-white film -- which you can see in its entirely below -- was quite a production. Jobs, marketing exec Mike Murray, and some of Mac team traveled from Apple headquarters to a soundstage in Los Angeles, and clearly, nothing was held back. They even rented a plane for the flyover shot. It's quite a ridiculous romp, something embraced wholeheartedly by Jobs. "He was very cool that day," recalls Chris Korody, whose company, Image Stream, oversaw the production of the film. "There was no Steve-ishness about it. I think he was mildly amused by the whole thing. It was kind of a big goof that he was doing this.”
Of course, Steve Jobs was someone who took even the "goofs" rather seriously. He refused to let someone to do his voiceover. He wanted the film to include his own voice. "Your battle will be long. It will hard, but it will be won," says a white-wigged Jobs. "I am sure your victory will be great. Insanely great."
The Mac, you see, was marketed as an "insanely great" computer for the rest of us, an easier-to-use alternative to the IBM PC. The film is chock-full of inside jokes and sly references sure to please any child of the '80s computer world. There's the dude called "Fatbits," a nod to Apple's MacPaint program. There's the joke about the Apple III disaster. Mitch Kapor and Bill Gates get name dropped as "generals" building software for the Mac. And the 1984 bits are everywhere. The film begins with a re-spin of Ridley Scott's epic Super Bowl ad, and, yes, the blonde woman shows up, complete with her hammer and short shorts.
The film talks up something called the Macintosh Office, a seamless combination of Macs, business software, servers that swapped files between machines, and laser printers. It was a truly innovate concept -- one that presaged many of the technologies we now take for granted. The trouble is that, at the time, it was little more than a vision. The product wouldn't ship for years. At one point, the film seems to acknowledge that things were a little behind -- one Apple solider is shocked to learn that the Mac Office hardware and software are actually finished -- but in the end, this was a film that pushed the tough times into the background.
"People loved it. They went crazy," remembers Korody. "I think [the sales staff] wanted to believe this was going to happen and the software will be there."
OK, things didn't work out that way. And the Mac didn't exactly destroy the evil IBM empire. That would require many more years. But the film was worth it. Steve Jobs was FDR.
