Plug-Uglies

Commercials of the stomach-turning variety got a good going-over last week from a listener with a sensitive stomach and a big audience. In Reader's Digest, Robert Littell protested against broadcast ads which made "some stranger's gizzards come bounding right into the room." He called such commercials "plug-uglies" and announced the formation of the outraged order of Plug Shrinkers.

Aspiring Plug Shrinkers were asked to write to 522 Fifth Avenue, New York City, name the sponsor of their pet retch, and check off what was wrong with his commercial: i.e. was it in bad taste, hokum, tiresome, repulsive, anatomical, silly, syrupy, or what.

Some of Littell's complaints:

> "Intrusion [in a good program] of a new voice, talking with cozing aggressiveness, like a syrup in a hurry, about the failings of a kidney."

> "The voices of the announcers are seldom natural, casual, human. Here is a solemn pulpit voice, preaching of clogged sinuses; here is a maniac with a congenital megaphone; here is baby talk, about as cute as a dwarf in diapers,"

>"A number of sponsors can't resist tying in their product with the war effort."

Critics point out that while the men on Bataan were slowly starving on mule-meat, they picked up short-wave exhortations to go to the ice box and make a luscious cheese sandwich. Since most of the shortwave broadcasts are made from records; it would be a simple matter to leave out the commercials.

There is a case for the commercial on the overseas broadcast. The big-network show commercial is as familiar to the U.S. soldier as a birdcall to a country-boy, a subway rattle to a New Yorker. It does not spell mother, but it may spell home. Nevertheless, unless the yum-yum is taken out of some short-wave commercials, it looked as if the Plug Shrinkers club could count on a big AEF membership.

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