They did music videos for a few of these too:
Blue Busters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KOnfN-ZDrs
Apple II Forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50
Leading the Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJy0O4UFSM
I guess stuff like this is what happens when your marketing department has too little to do.
You have it backwards. These were filmed versions of Apple corporate presentations, done for various events. The "Apple II Forever" was used at the 1984 sales meeting to introduce the //c and persuade dealers that the Apple ][ cash cow wasn't going to die overnight with the introduction of the Macintosh.
This was the era before cheap video projectors and PowerPoint. These shows were done with huge banks of slide projectors and a bunch of clever software to sequence the slides and do interesting transitions between them. What you're seeing on YouTube is a videotaped capture. Watch those videos again and look carefully. Each frame is one slide on a projector being crossfaded or overlapped with another slide on another projector. This happened in real time.
Decades later, the Apple corporate pre-show lives on in their WWDC and product introduction events, just in MPEG and 4K form.
More here, and it's kind of a fascinating artifact for its time:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/11/1077232/corporat...
The MIT Technology Review article mentions the epic 1987 SAAB show, which someone uploaded to YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEQq58_nWkE
Holy crap, is that Ken Nordine narrating?!?
Thank you for sharing that context, it makes a lot of sense. I had no idea about the "massive banks of slide projectors" thing either, as far as I knew slide projector technology had never advanced beyond it being the thing annoying people use to make you sit through their vacation photos. That's very interesting.
The funny thing is that the basic projector didn't advance technically. They just found a way to multiplex them into something larger. Like taking a single LED and figuring out how to make a video wall.
This is like maximum 80's cringe... I say that as a child of the 80's... I'm half tempted to cut this up and try and build some sort of vaporwave track. Seems tailor made for vaporwave.
Oh wow. This is exactly why people were trying to require a license to use a synthesizer. Maybe it gets better ?? [1] It could probably be clipped into something good though, yeah.
OTOH, when the piano hits, Ripples feels so much like I'd Do Anything for Love for a bit, but predates it by six years.
[1] 3 minutes in, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. EDIT: after the whole thing, yeah, it doesn't really get better... but I kind of like the APPLE spelling thing towards the end of the cassette. Ending on some laser shooting sound effects is a good note though.
Philippe Kahn, of Borland fame, recorded several jazz albums. Pacific High came with one release of Borland dBase in the '90s, this is the song Turbo Disturbo:
Wouldn't releasing an album during that time be quite risky because of the ongoing legal issues with Apple Corps[1]? In 1991 Apple legal was so paranoid that they even worried about the names of Mac OS system sounds[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
This looks like something that was handed out at a WWDC or similar conference around that time, especially with the inclusion of the "Apple ][ Forever!" song. It was never for sale.
That said, I miss the Garamond era of Apple design and marketing. It brings back a lot of memories.
To those who know more about this, who is the "Blue Busters" song targeting? (It's just the Ghostbusters theme)
"If there's something strange, stinking up your desk, who you gonna call? Blue busters!"
“Blue” is a reference to Big Blue, a.k.a. IBM.
Hard to deny culture has gotten less optimistic when you see stuff like this.
They were certainly over optimistic about "Apple II Forever"!
Forever only means 9 more years apparently.
It lives on in Unicode... forever.
This leaves me without words, and I only listened to the first track.
"Breaking Through" (~22:00) is, truly, an artifact from a lost era. They don't write power ballads like that any more.
We’re making it out of Cupertino with this one.
Time will tell wether I find myself singing "Apple II Forever" in the shower.
Making life better and better!
Apple II forever!
Bringing the rainbow to you!
(Join us.)