Mr T promotes Atari

Mr T promotes the Atari 800XL home computer in this advertisement from the mid-1980s.

The Atari 800XL was designed to look like a common typewriter and was a follow-up to the hugely successful Atari 2600 video game console. It had an expandable system with two accessible cartridge ports under a front cover. The cartridges could simply be plugged in.

It sold well and provided a solid alternative to the Commodore as a capable low-price computer with superior graphics and sound capabilities.

Mr T was a popular actor and television star of The A Team, known for wearing large amounts of gold jewellery and for the catchphrase, 'I pity the fool'.

He was a good choice to promote Atari, not only because of his popularity at the time, but because in many ways he had a cartoonish public persona that would appeal to teenagers. The A Team itself has had a number of incarnations as a video game.

A nice touch in the ad is creating an Atari computer image of Mr T, thereby demonstrating the computer's graphic potential.