Remember Apple’s ‘1994’ corporate video with Jobs impersonating Franklin Delano Roosevelt we told you about last week? Apparently, not everyone liked it so here’s a different one from the depths of the web archives, also sporting brief Jobs cameo appearance.
Just like the ‘1994’ clip, it’s aimed squarely at Apple’s arch-enemy in the early days, the almighty IBM. Dubbed ‘Blue Busters’ and dating back to 1984, this four-minute footage was shown at the same worldwide sales staff meeting in Hawaii in October 1984 like the ‘1994’ clip…
It’s been discovered by Network World. You may recall the same publication was also credited with the discovery of the ‘1994’ sales clip.
‘Blue Busters’ is basically a spoof of the Ghostbusters movie, down to a reworked version of its famous theme song. The clip also features brief cameo appearances of the two Steves that co-founded Apple, Steve Jobs (marks 3:03 and 4:03) and Steve Wozniak (mark 2:20).
Generally speaking, you can tell a company is in dire straits when the CEO appears in ads. Though both ‘1994’ and ‘Blue Busters’ were shown to sales people only, some will probably deem Jobs’ appearance in these two clips a bit awkward, to say the least.
IBM was the enemy back then and Apple needed to rally the troops so I guess management figured sales folks needed some good ol’ morale-boosting to unite around the common enemy.
We’ll let you be the judge.
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How the heck did Network World got hold of the clip?
Easy.
Craig Elliott, former Apple employee and now CEO and co-founder of cloud-computing startup Pertino Networks, gave them access to this material.
Did you find it funny and engaging? Boring, perhaps? Downright stupid, you say?
Meet us in comments.