Word: gimmick
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...Boston's Jordan Marsh department store just before Christmas 1948 proudly touted the new cameras with the slogan "Snap it, see it." As curious customers watched in fascination, Polaroid pictures almost miraculously developed right inside the camera in one minute. Photography's professionals dismissed it as a gimmick, but Edwin Land had just founded the instant-photo industry, now a $1.2 billion business. Last week Land, 70, one of the premier tinkerers of American history, announced his retirement as chief executive officer of Polaroid amid a whirlwind of controversy. Land's departure will be due in large...
Once upon a time, a savvy Japanese hotelman named Hideki Yokoi came up with the ultimate gimmick. He spent $300,000 for a phoenix-shaped, 22-karat, solid gold bathtub, and installed it 14 years ago in the basement of his Funabara resort hotel about 100 miles south of Tokyo. A bit larger than normal, the tub holds a cramped two, and Yokoi was able to charge honeymooners and Very Good Friends $2.80 apiece for a five-minute soak that he claimed would prolong their lives for at least one year. For $4, a photographer burnished the moments for posterity...
...even though its play was less than brilliant. Now the chess ability of the reprogrammed chip is high enough to make any parlor wood-pusher loosen his collar and roll up his sleeves, and it is the machine's distinctly machine-like speech that is the dazzling gimmick. Turn the doodad on, and it says, dropping each word like a cinder block, "I- am- Fidelity's - Chess - Challenger - your -computer - opponent." The speech is by no means as friendly and natural sounding as Speak & Spell's, but it is meant to intimidate adults, not encourage children...
...English Village (Atheneurm; $7.95) is totally mute. Still, John S. Goodall's watercolors are eloquent enough to carry the progress of a British town from medieval beginnings to its present state. In other hands, the use of half pages overlaid on full ones might be a gimmick. But Goodall's visual narrative is so controlled, and his costumes and customs so accurate, that history assumes a personality. Moving by lively steps, it arranges hemlines and coats, advances from midwives to doctors, from town criers to village schools, to the ambiguous benefits of buses and telephones. No other Christmas...
Granted, show business folk have every right to politick. And politicians are entitled to use every self-serving gimmick that the law allows. Still, given the American tendency to worship stars, one may wonder whether eventually show business might be too casually accepted as an appropriate training ground for political leadership. The question is pertinent even if California's election of Actor George Murphy as a U.S. Senator is shrugged off as a typical West Coast aberration...