Rusty Saber: This article may cure all your ills; ask your doctor

With more to say about TV commercials last week than space to say it, Rusty Saber picks up where it left off.

If it seems there is a veritable plethora of TV ads for prescription drugs, you are right. In case you missed it, last week's column discussed who may or may not be target audiences for various TV commercials. No such questions about the intended audience for medicine ads: People who have, think they have, or are afraid they may someday have certain illnesses. Commercials urge all of the above to ask their doctors about these concoctions.

They are all over TV and so similar in content they could be produced by the same advertising agency. All suggest these wonder drugs "may" cure ev-erything from A to Z or at least from anemia to xenophobia and clear up everything from moles to colds.

Listening to any one of them may cause you to ask why the maker hasn't received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Then comes the kicker! In hushed tones, a stern voice warns that if you are male or female and have ever breathed air through your nostrils, this medicine could render you unable to walk upright, eat solid food or make a fist. You should ask your doctor if a prescription might benefit you.

I wonder how physicians feel about the "help" they receive in practicing medicine. I mean, if a compound is a cure-all for dandruff, athlete's foot, and everything in between, but may kill you if you take it, surely it was written up in all the medical journals, and your physician knows if you need it. Television advertising isn't cheap. I wonder how much these massive advertising campaigns add to the cost of these medicines?

Granted, these data aren't products of formal research; however, I kept track of commercials with messages in print so tiny as to be unreadable, at the bottom of the screen ex-plaining why certain advertising claims in the ads "might" be, shall we say, misleading. To be truly scientific, I would have had to watch TV until I had seen every commercial on TV, which means I would now be rolling around on the floor, swallowing my tongue, demanding more "Laverne and Shirley" reruns and yelling, "Long live the Fonze."

Based on my informal re-search, the runners-up in the "So no one can sue us for de-ceptive advertising claims" category are ads promoting car rentals; the average length of messages being five lines ex-plaining why the rental deals "might" not be as great as the ads lead you to believe.

Without question, new car ads are the hands-down small-print champions. Low sale prices, low or no interest rates, and claims of superior quality apparently require a lot of small print disclosures. The average for car ads I found is six lines; the longest, nine lines. Forget content; they appear on the screen barely long enough to count the lines, let alone to read them.

It is to be hoped that a nice quiet spot for Premier Auto Outlet will be successful; it features owner Wayne Lewis sitting in a fishing boat on an Ozark river, casually and gently explaining that he is fishing instead of trying to sell cars by screaming at the audience. Now that's an idea whose time has come. It joins the soft and gentle ad campaign Springfield TV legend Fred Raines is doing for Bill Roberts Chevrolet. I've never understood why anyone presumes being screamed at incites people to buy cars, or anything else.

Maybe these softer and gentler spots will someday replace the shouters.

If the above doesn't prove I am not totally hostile toward all TV commercials, here are a couple more I like a lot. Okla-homa and Arkansas have equally magnificent tourism promotion ads. One would have to be a stick-in-the-mud, stay-at-home curmudgeon to fail to be intrigued with both states as tourist destinations. Both commercials are so similar in content and quality they could have been created by the same ad agency. Regardless of the creative talent responsible, both are eye-catching.

Sure, some TV commercials are annoying, others may be tolerable, and a scant few are actually enjoyable. Regardless of how you may feel about them, commercials make it possible for free TV to come into your living room; a small price to pay indeed.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury Un-iversity.)