Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cineplasty (placing hooks in stump muscles to work limbs, so that artificial arms can now be lifted over the head), it has gone on to plastic materials that look like human skin. The "gloves" on its artificial hands now bear fingerprints which must be registered with the FBI. Latest gimmick: putting a human-type pigment in the plastic, so that the hands, instead of turning green, retain their color even under fluorescent light...
...process of doing, to the TV medium. It has made mincemeat of its two competitors on Tuesdays at 10 p.m., E.D.T. (NBC's long-reliable Truth or Consequences, ABC's The Name's the Same). It has persuaded CBS to take on its creator and owner, gimmick-loaded Louis (Quiz Kids, Down You Go, Conversation) Cowan as a top-level executive. It has set network executives to brooding darkly over the question of what The Question will do this autumn to such giants as I Love Lucy, Jackie Gleason, Disneyland and George Gobel, let alone to plans...
...gloomier moments Poet T. S. Eliot predicted that Western civilization's sole enduring monuments would be "the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls." Not if Bart Leiper of Gatlinburg, Tenn. has his way. Leiper, a drumbeater for the local Chamber of Commerce, needed a gimmick to promote the opening of Gatlinburg's new Pigeon Forge golf course and hit on a surefire teaser: atomic golf balls. At nearby Oak Ridge he persuaded scientists to inject three golf balls with pellets of radioactive cobalt 60, happily headed home to Gatlinburg with the fixings. On opening day last...
...Most I-15 are in mental hospitals; an I-2 believes that he is the hub of the world, which exists to take care of him. An I-3 knows that something is expected of him, but hopes to find an angle or gimmick to get around it. I-4 knows better than this, but feels inadequate and doesn't know what to do with that part of himself that fails to come up to his ideal of a strong and capable man. I-5 knows that he has a strong side, a protective side and a side that...
...alongside the screen, he can turn the set on (and off): by aiming at a second slot, he can switch stations; by aiming at a third slot, he can turn off the sound. Cost about $75 more than conventional TV sets. But the gadget is more than a sales gimmick; because it makes a sport of knocking off the sound when the commercial comes on, Zenith has a new weapon in its fight...