When the armed forces relied on the draft for recruits, most of the advertising they ran was created by agencies on a pro-bono basis and appeared as public-service messages.

And it is unusually good: a harsh public-service message built into a clever, suspenseful thriller.

The patched-together story exists mainly as a conduit for public-service messages.

The council creates public-service messages, one of its first, in World War II, being "Loose Lips Sink Ships."

This has been a public-service message.

He said he was trying to allay that reaction with public-service messages on the radio and another round of letters explaining that the thresholds can be overriden.

Despite the intermittently successful efforts of the director, Joseph Sargent, to keep the story moving, the public-service messages fall like duds.

Curiously, no one ever warns the notorious Kurt about AIDS; it's as if these people live in a world without public-service messages on television.

One of his other "commercials" was actually a public-service message, with fund-raising goals, for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Smith & Wesson, however, argues that the series is a public-service message.