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Austin Chronicle Review
by Marc Savlov
If you grew up watching TV in the Seventies, as I did, then you doubtless have a small portion of your heart reserved for those magical, shoddy ?As Seen On TV? products such as Ron Popeil's miraculous Pocket Fisherman, the unstoppable Ginsu carving knife (?It actually cuts clean through this tin can!!?), and RonCo's Amazing Salad Shooter. How could you live without these miraculous aids to modern household convenience? You couldn't, of course, and so the products' creators and their late-night television ?pitch people? became, oddly enough, a cultural sub-genre in their own right.
Jacobs' zippy, engaging documentary examines the history of pitchmaking, from its turn-of-the-century origins among snake-oil salesman and carnival barkers in England to those heady days during the introduction of television to the American heartland, where this unique form of advertising was refined and redesigned for a whole new generation. Goggle-eyed viewers and struggling housewives, desperate for the labor-saving devices and doo-dads so colorfully promoted into their living rooms via the tube......
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