DISCIPLINE, I heartily believe, is one of the most important ingredients in any artwork. Especially in any artwork based on one of the “popular” (or formerly-popular) art forms. As any decent jazz teacher will tell you, you must know the rules before you can properly break them.

Herewith, some important disciplinary elements of time and space for the true pop-culture scholar.

0.2 seconds (five frames of film; determined by animation legend Tex Avery to be the minimum time for the human eye to “read” a motion gag such as a falling anvil).

0:58 (actual content length of a 60-second TV commercial, dating back to when most spots were edited and distributed on film, so local stations could splice spots onto one reel without worrying about the two-second differential between a frame of film and its corresponding soundtrack segment).

1:00 (standard length of a TV commercial break in the ’50s).

2:10 (average minimum length of a TV commercial break these days).

3:30 (more-or-less maximum length of a Top 40 single in the ’50s and ’60s, so radio stations could expect to fit 1:30 of commercials and DJ patter into a 5:00 segment).

4 minutes (limit of a 78 rpm record).

6 minutes (the final standard length of a Warner Bros. cartoon; 540 feet of film).

7 minutes (maximum length of a side of a 45 rpm record, without using analog sound compression).

10 minutes (standard length of an act in a vaudeville revue; later the maximum length of a one-reel film comedy or newsreel).

16-20 minutes (average and maximum lengths of a two-reel film comedy).

24 minutes (length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, before they started cramming more ads into prime-time; nowadays a sitcom can be as short as 19.5 minutes).

30.5 minutes (maximum length of a side of an LP record when using analog sound compression).

72 minutes (maximum length of a standard audio CD).

80 minutes (considered the minimal length of a commercial studio feature film; the standard length of most U.S. animated features).

300-400 words (average length of a book page).

750 words (standard length of a newspaper op-ed column).

800 words (standard length of an old New Yorker “casual” humor story.)

1,000-1,400 words (typical length range of a magazine page).

5,000 words (standard length of an old Saturday Evening Post short story).

90,000 words (maximum length of a mass-market-paperback novel in the ’50s, when publishers were still trying to stick to a 25-cent price).

6 episodes (minimum duration of a BBC sitcom season).

13 episodes (standard duration of a ’30s movie serial).

39 episodes (original duration of a TV season on the U.S. big-three networks, derived from the days of live radio; now whittled down to as few as 20 and as many as 30).

65 episodes (standard duration of the first season of a weekday animated series; the episodes may be in production over two years before premiering).

100 episodes (generally considered the minimal duration of a TV series to succeed in syndicated reruns; also the typical duration of a Mexican telenovela).

Monday: More on the end of Another World.