'Blue Busters': Apple's 'Ghostbusters' Spoof From 1984 Internal sales-meeting video surfaces
You want me to watch some company's goofy internal sales-meeting video from 1984 based on Ghostbusters? Thanks, but I'll pass. Wait, it's from Apple? OMG, lemme see! In October of that Orwellian year, Apple unleashed this anti-IBM piece spoofing the then-current box-office smash. Retitled "Blue Busters"—IBM being Big Blue—the presentation tweaks the film's impossibly catchy but thoroughly annoying theme song. Instead of proclaiming his courage when confronted by ghosts, singer Ray Parker Jr. now belts out spoof lyrics like, "We ain't afraid of no blue." Apple employees are the stars. Yes, Steve is in there. No, not that Steve. I can't spot him, at any rate. It's the other one, Steve Wozniak, who's not a cultural icon but still got insanely rich for inventing a technology whose spinning pinwheel of futility bedevils humanity on a daily basis. Apple apparently screened a Back to the Future parody in 1985, but it hasn't popped up on the Web—yet. (Jobs as McFly? Now there's an idea way ahead of its time!) The intense interest in such material all these years later underscores the coolness and mystique so brilliantly cultivated by the Apple brand. After all, firms produce this kind of cornball crap all the time. If a similar video surfaced from any other company, would so many folks give a damn?
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