This Month

HABIT dies hard, as almost any television commercial will demonstrate. Radio’s ten-word advertising vocabulary ¹ still bounds the chatter of TV’s spellbinders, while the accompanying pictorial techniques are largely based on the kind of trick photography that once animated cartoon advertising in the old-time movie house. So advertisers dabble in motion picture film “recordings,” but they don’t seem to know what to do with the movies beyond showing The Product in motion instead of standing still. Messages by smoke signals are about the only stunt that TV has not carried over from more primitive days. Of TV′s new power to tap the whole world for information and ideas, the advertiser seems thus far unaware. Example: —

The television commercial for the Lincoln Cosmopolitan is based on two main assumptions: that no TV owner has ever seen an automobile, and that proof is required that it will run. Thus, the film transcription opens up with a pretty girl getting into a topdown convertible. She pushes a button to lower a window. The window comes down! She closes the door. It not only closes but it stays shut!

Haven’t you dreamed of owning a car like that? But there are more wonders to come.

The girl touches the starter button, sets the automatic transmission, steps on the gas — and what happens? The car moves off down the street. Yes, there she goes, she s on her way! Everything in order, too: no bucking or yawing, car seems to steer effectively, and she keeps right on along a boulevard as slick as you please. But look — what have we here? The camera shifts to a close-up of the left front wheel. Nothing wrong there, either: around and around it goes, it’s neither lopsided nor falling off. Look at that shiny hubcap revolve! What a car! Back to the girl again, we see her hair blowing in the breeze. Fun, eh? Radio was never like this.

Having shown that she can start a Lincoln Cosmopolitan and drive it, all by herself, the girl goes into a bit of fancy stuff—a corner. You can see the car actually slow down (must be a brake of some kind included), and the girl steers it on around the corner, apparently without overtaxing the sturdy vehicle, for it remains right side up, wheels still on, and with nary a smash to show for her feat. Ye-e-e-e-es, friends, there is nothing finer on the road.

The girl bowls along for a few more rods of boulevard and pulls up near the entrance to a smart hotel. Still unassisted, she manages to bring the car to a dead stop. She opens ihe door, which still works perfectly. steps out, closes the door successfully, and departs on some errand.

The announcer s running story during these astonishing goings-on is in standard radio language, but he makes it sound as if the girl — doubtless a professional stunt-woman —were surviving a plunge over Niagara Falls in a newer, finer, easier, smoother, richer, bigger barrel.

Chevrolet presents an equally bizarre view of a new sedan in full working order which gets over a highway without mishap. It stops and starts without flying to pieces, but one gets the impression that this is a locally contrived commercial sponsored only by the New England dealers, and what additional tricks the car can show on a larger hookup have not been vouchsafed the Boston audience. (I do not recall a pretty girl as the daredevil pilot of the Chevrolet commercial, but after all, it’s a lowerpriced car than the Lincoln.)

Oldsmobile, meanwhile, seems content to depict a man and woman perched on a huge rocket (“Rocket” engine— get it?) and I am not sure whether the Olds is put through its paces or not. That the car is susceptible of being driven I have no doubt.

But now that they have sated our curiosity about what an automobile looks like on the highway, the commercials might show us how these cars come into being. Even a TV owner might enjoy seeing the testing tracks, laboratories, and production lines. Where are the bungalow-sized machines that make the bodies, the metallurgists searching out flaws with mysterious rays, the great lathes and borers? What is involved in crating a car for shipment overseas? What is the painting process? Most of the motor makers had incomparably better exhibits at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 than anything they have shown the growing millions of TV customers.

The brewers are similarly perplexed by what to put into a filmed commercial. They have thought up photographing beer in the bottle, beer in the glass, and people fondling these novelties, but surely this is something short of a traveler’s tale for anyone who has ever set foot in a saloon.

Anything that comes in a can with a label on it seems to fascinate the TV commercial folks almost as completely as the self-propulsion principle of the automobile. A gallon of wallpaper remover strikes them as the supreme visual triumph. The TV lens first stares at it for about a minute, then circles it cautiously to show its four sides. At this point an actress picks up the can and talks about it for a while. She reads the instructions on the label and, as the camera enlarges it in a close-up so that we can read it too, she reads it again. She puts the can down, reluctantly, and repeats to the audience the gist of the label. “A pint of this” (patting the can) “added to a gallon of water,” says the actress, “and that’s all there is to it.” (And all that remains is to get the paper off the wall.) By the time the actress has gone through more or less identical routines with the halfgallon and one-quart sizes, the TV viewer will have a fair idea of what a can of wallpaper remover looks like.

The advertising values of reiterating a trade name or symbol are beyond dispute, but repeating a commercial film sequence week after week suggests a phrase which deserves meditation by TV. The phrase is: “This is where we came in.”