Word: serialization
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Here, in a superhuman cliche, ends the first chapter of Columbia's newest serial, finished last week. Superman, which cost $350,000, is one of the most expensive serials ever made. It will not be seen on Broadway, nor reviewed in the papers, but it will play in 7,000 U.S. movie houses and hundreds of schools. After 36 years, the serial (trade name: cliffhanger) is still a profitable Hollywood industry...
...Manly Smile. Each chapter is constructed as rigidly as a classical sonnet around a single major "hazard" to the hero or heroine, and invariably ends just as death's jaws close. Serial writers ran out of hazards years ago, have been working switches on them ever since; the loose cotter pin on the stagecoach, for example, has been used an estimated 7,000 times...
...morality plays, serials unvaryingly make everything black & white. Hero & heroine are Good; villain and assistant villain (brain & brawn) are Evil. Love finds its strongest expression in a frank, manly smile. Sex never, never rears its snuggly head. (One serial director recalls that when Carole Landis first reared her chest in serials, it was sternly taped flat by the make-up department...
Your article entitled "Poison Pen" [TIME, April 12] has all the markings of a wait-till-next-week serial...
...vaudeville gag told of a conceited counterfeiter who came to grief because he could not resist putting his own picture in place of George Washington's. Osaka's aging, ailing Counterfeiter Kanji Ikeda and his wife Yoshino were not vain, but they did arrange the serial numbers on their fake bills to read as messages to the son whose death in the war had turned their life to misery and despair. One of the Arabic numbers-797,423-read aloud in Japanese, meant: "Don't cry, honorable elder...