The Friday Funny: Mr T. Battles IT Consultants, Frees Zombies

Mr. T is one of the most colorful characters ever to appear on the small (or large) screen. I was an avid watcher of the original A-Team television series in my youth, and Mr. T’s Bosco “B.A.” Baracus was one of my favorite characters. Nobody could lay the smack down (or talk smack) like Mr. T.

Mr. T virtualizes some IT fools.

Hitachi Data Systems obviously thought Mr. T was as cool as I did, and cast the actor in a series of advertisements and YouTube videos extolling the virtues of Hitachi’s virtualization expertise. The embedded video was shot in 2007 or so, and in it we see Mr. T battling with a big-headed consultant who looks like a refugee from the set of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. In the skit we see the ginormous-domed consultant prattle on about his IT importance before being startled by Mr. T bursting through a wall. Mr. T then proceeds to eat said consultant’s brain (“Tastes like chicken, sucka!”), which then frees a variety of zombies from the  evil yoke of traditional IT thinking.

I won’t spoil it all for you, but some of my favorite lines include:

• “I am the ‘T’ in IT! I am the virtualizer!”
• “I’m gonna virtualize you fools!”
• “Intelligence is in the controller and never in the network!”

And arguably the highlight of the video (and undoubtedly the exact phrase hatched in the brain of a Hitachi exec that dreamed up the campaign) was Mr. T shouting “I pity the fool that doesn’t use Hitachi Data System virtualization!”