Word: viewers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COMMERCIALS are infuriating. They are also irresistible. Commercials are an outrageous nuisance. They are also apt to be better than the programs they interrupt. Commercials are the heavy tribute that the viewer must pay to the sponsor in exchange for often dubious pleasure. They are also an American art form. A minor art form, but the ultimate in mixed media: sight, sound and sell...
...more fascinating phenomena in television. They are part of the background music, as it were, of the American scene. Hardly anybody pays total attention to them; hardly anybody totally ignores them. Many, the very good and the very bad, force or insinuate themselves into the imagination. Even a reluctant viewer cannot quite resist the euphoria induced by airline ads that waft him up up and away, or travel spots, island-hopping in a wink of quick cuts, that drop him on a sun-splashed beach. Even while grumbling, he marvels at the dexterity, not to say ludicrous imagery...
What can be done? Chances are that if everyone keeps his fingers crossed and buys the right products, the light-hearted uncommercials will spread and increasingly crowd the ugh-plugs off the air. But that is not enough. Another prospect is that the networks, goaded by viewer resentment, will move closer to the European scheme by having fewer but slightly longer commercial breaks. At present, with 9,000 new items appearing on the supermarket shelves each year, sponsors have started "clustering" cramming more but shorter messages into the same time space. In the past two years alone, the number...
...interesting, or links three, four or five commercials in a row during the station breaks. Even the war news suddenly comes to an abrupt halt for the sake of sell. The bloody events in Viet Nam, incongruously flanked with sales messages glorifying the good life at home, leave the viewer with the inexplicable sensation that the commercials and the war are one and the same: Which is the more real...
...developed by 15th century draftsmen, perspective is a set of rules that enables the artist to convey the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane by making his structural lines converge at an imaginary "vanishing point" on an imaginary horizon at the viewer's eye level...