Why don’t we have regular reviewers of TV and print advertising? It’s an art form, isn’t it?

Considering that we spend so many of our potentially creative hours watching television commercials or reading advertisements, it seems odd to me that we don’t have advertising critics, as we have book critics, music critics, movie critics and drama critics.

I believe advertisements are routinely criticized in the advertising trade press, and awards are made for the best of the year, but we do not find advertising criticism as a regular feature of our daily newspapers.

Is that because newspapers are dependent on advertising, and don’t want to risk offending the hand that feeds them? I doubt it. The business sections of newspapers today are no more reverent of their advertisers than they are of any other errant corporation.

I think it’s more likely that we don’t like to admit that advertising is a pop art form, and one that has more effect on our life styles than religion or literature.

We are bombarded with TV commercials, sometimes as many as eight in a row. (And why are they called commercials, instead of ads?) All you have to do is watch an old movie on TV to find out that TV advertising is a highly competitive, highly stylized, extremely prodigal and sometimes creative enterprise.

Some art, some imagination and some humor find their way into commercials. Among my recent favorites is the one in which the elderly financial adviser is speaking to the rich little boy who is sitting in an enormous executive chair. “Money isn’t everything,” he says. The boy looks up in dismay. “Just kidding ,” the old man reassures him.

I can’t remember who the sponsor of that charming ad was, which is part of the problem, I imagine, for sponsors. They pull off a clever ad and nobody can remember what it’s advertising. No product identification.

I also like the one in which the little girl is asked to recite the alphabet in class. She says, “A, B, C, D, E, F . . . E . . . F . . . E. F. HUTTON!” And all the other kids lean closer to get the inside tip. Of course you can’t forget the sponsor of that one because it’s built in.

I also liked the one in which a young woman is sitting in an outdoor cafe, eating some kind of Oriental dish (again, I forget what kind); she opens her fortune cookie and reads that “a tall, dark man” will enter her life. Just then a tall, dark man comes in, smiles at her, and goes on to kiss another young woman waiting for him at another table. “Oh, well,” our disappointed heroine says, “not that tall.”

The appeal of that one is not so much in the idea as in that young woman’s utterly beguiling performance.

I notice that some sponsors get off on themes and can’t let go. Thus it seems years that we have had to listen to the interminable and essentially meaningless argument between those beer lovers who think Miller’s Lite “tastes great” and those who think it’s “less filling”--as if those two qualities would generally be thought inconsistent with one another, and as if either were true of the sponsor’s beer. How many more illiterate shouting matches must we endure before Miller’s gives up this silly pitch?

On the contrary, I admit to having been enchanted by some of a competitor’s repetitious plugs. There seems to be no end to the variations of light that can be provided in response to a bar patron’s order, “Gimme a light.” Some of these are very funny, and the result invariably is that the chastened patron amends his order to “Gimme a Bud Light.”

At least that one doesn’t ascribe any dubious quality to the sponsor’s beer. It simply advocates specificity, which isn’t a bad idea.

I wonder if there are any advertisements or commercials today that will stay with young people all their lives, as two ads of my childhood have.

Perhaps none is more unforgettable, especially for boys, than the one for the Charles Atlas body-building course in which a muscular young man is shown kicking sand in the face of a 96-pound weakling at the beach, humiliating him in front of his girlfriend. Naturally, the puny kid sends away for the course and in the next panel we see him putting the bully to flight. For a 96-pound weakling like me, that one was pretty hard to resist.

I can also not forget that wonderful ad--full page in Liberty and Good Housekeeping magazines--that showed a young man adjusting the piano stool at a party while other guests snickered and made derogatory remarks behind their hands. And under it the memorable line: “They laughed when I sat down at the piano--but when I started to play . . . !”

That was for a correspondence school of music. I never signed up. But I still have fantasies in which they laugh when I sit down at the piano, only to sit spellbound as I toss off the Hungarian Rhapsody.

We still have the body-building ads in newspapers and magazines and on TV, but most appeals today are to the self-indulgent. Eat, drink and be merry.

The Army’s “Be all that you can be” commercials are an exception, and I imagine they draw a lot of young men and women into the armed services, despite the government’s inept and fatal policies in the field.

If I were young I would also be an easy mark for that Marine Corps pitch, “We’re looking for a few good men.”

Especially if they added, “Make love, not war.”