Pretend it's the '90s

Okay, for this post, let's all pretend that it's 1998 or so and parodies of Apple's "Think Different" ads are still relevant.

So, when I was searching the net for pictures of Dr. Zaius for that previous post, I came across this parody ad that brought a chuckle to my heart:


That got me thinking and I poked around some. I had seen the Charles Manson spoof, for example, but Wikipedia alluded to a Bill Gates parody of the ad, too. Intrigued, I poked around, but all I found was this:


To me, that's less funny than just a straight-up "Think Different" parody with Bill Gates. The straight-up ad would be funny in several different ways--- not the least of which is that Bill Gates is a guy who thought differently, and, antitrust suits be damned, had the vision to shepherd a product into such ubiquity that in many ways it's transformed society (and has some good philanthropy cred, too). To imagine that Apple would use him in an ad campaign presumably intended to point out their difference in spirit from Microsoft is funny precisely because he's the sort of person they would use in the ad, were he not the competition. But this lame parody is just another potshot in the Mac vs. Microsoft wars that still exists only in the heads of Mac afficionados.