Stan Freberg

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Stan Freberg

In 1950, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg are backstage doing both voices and puppeteering on Bob Clampett's Time for Beany (1949–54) at KTLA in Los Angeles. Freberg operates Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and Dishonest John, while Butler handles Captain Huffenpuff and Beany.
Born Stanley Victor Freberg
August 7, 1926 (1926-08-07) (age 82)
Los Angeles, California
Occupation voice actor
puppeteer
advertising creative director

Stanley Victor Freberg (b. August 7, 1926, Los Angeles, California) is an American author, recording artist, animation voice actor, comedian, radio personality, puppeteer, and advertising creative director.

The son of a Baptist minister, Stan Freberg grew up in Pasadena, California. His traditional upbringing is reflected both in the gentle sensitivity that underpins his work (despite his liberal use of biting satire and parody) and in his refusal to accept alcohol and tobacco manufacturers as sponsors—an impediment to his radio career when he took over for Jack Benny on CBS radio. As Freberg explained to Rusty Pipes:

After I replaced Jack Benny in 1957, they were unable to sell me with spot announcements in the show. That would mean that every three minutes I'd have to drop a commercial in. So I said, 'Forget it. I want to be sponsored by one person like Benny was, by American Tobacco or State Farm Insurance,' except that I wouldn't let them sell me to American Tobacco. I refused to let them sell me to any cigarette company.[1]

Stan Freberg's first wife, Donna, died in 2000, and he married Betty Hunter in 2001, an act that caused him to become estranged from his son, Donavan Freberg.

Contents

[edit] Animation

Freberg was employed as a voice actor in animation shortly after graduating from Alhambra High School. He began at Warner Brothers in 1944 by taking the advice of his uncle, stage magician Raymond Freberg ("Conray the Magician"), who advised him to take a bus into Los Angeles and have the driver let him off "in central Los Angeles," whereupon Freberg was to walk into the first building he saw and ask for an audition. As he describes in his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Times Books, 1988), he did this, getting off the bus when he sees a sign that says "talent agency," walking in, and immediately finding work at Warner Brothers.[2]

His first cartoon voice work was in Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears (1944) as Junyer Bear, followed by Roughly Squeaking (1946) as Bertie; and in 1947, he was heard in It's a Grand Old Nag (Charlie Horse), The Goofy Gophers (Tosh), and One Meat Brawl (Grover Groundhog and Walter Winchell). He often found himself paired off with Mel Blanc while at Warner Brothers, where the two men performed such pairs as the Goofy Gophers Hubie & Bertie and Spike the Bulldog & Chester the Terrier.[3] He was also the voice of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones's Looney Tunes cartoon What's Brewin', Bruin? (1948), featuring Jones's version of The Three Bears. Another was the voice of Pete Puma in the 1952 cartoon Rabbit's Kin, in which he did an impression of Frank Fontaine's "Crazy Guggenheim" voice.

Freberg's first credit as a voice actor in a Looney Tunes cartoon was in Three Little Bops (1957). His work as a voice actor for Walt Disney Productions included the role of Beaver in Lady and the Tramp (1955). He succeeded Kent Rogers as the voice of Beaky Buzzard during production of The Bashful Buzzard after Rogers was killed in World War II. Freberg also provided the voice of Sam, the orange cat paired with Sylvester in the Oscar-winning Mouse and Garden (1960). He voiced Cage E. Coyote, the father of Wile E. Coyote, in the 2000 short Little Go Beep.

[edit] Films

Freberg made his movie debut as an on-screen actor in the comedy Callaway Went Thataway (1951), a satirical spoof on the marketing of Western stars (apparently inspired by the TV success of Hopalong Cassidy). When Freberg costarred with Mala Powers in Geraldine (1953) as sobbing singer Billy Weber, the character enabled him to do his satire on vocalist Johnnie Ray. In 1963, Freberg appeared as the Deputy Sheriff in the mega-comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. His on-screen television roles included The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1967) and The Monkees (1966). In 1996, he portrayed the continuing character of Mr. Parkin on Roseanne.

[edit] Capitol Records

Freberg began making satirical recordings for Capitol Records, beginning with "John and Marsha" and "Ragtime Dan," recorded on February 10, 1951.[4] A seasonal recording, "The Night Before Christmas/Nuttin' for Christmas," made in 1955, still remains a cult classic. He scored a huge success with "John and Marsha" (released in both 45-rpm and 78-rpm formats), a soap opera parody that consisted of the title characters (both played by Freberg) repeating each other's names. In a 1954 follow-up, he used pedal steel guitarist Speedy West to satirize the 1953 Ferlin Husky country hit, "A Dear John Letter," as "A Dear John and Marsha Letter" (Capitol 2677).

With Daws Butler and June Foray, he produced his 1951 Dragnet parody, "St. George and the Dragonet." The latter recording was a #1 hit for four weeks in late 1953; on "Little Blue Riding Hood," the record's B-side, the title character is arrested for smuggling goodies. After "I've Got You Under My Skin" (1952), he followed with more popular musical satires, including "Sh-Boom" (1954), "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (1955), and "The Great Pretender" (1956). He spoofed Elvis Presley in 1956 with his own version of Elvis' first gold record, "Heartbreak Hotel," in which the echo chamber goes out of control. In Freberg's spoof, Elvis rips his jeans during his performance, a problem the real Elvis had with jumpsuits when performing in the early 1970s.

Another hit to get the Freberg treatment was Johnnie Ray's weepy "Cry," which Freberg rendered as "Try" ("You too can be unhappy… if you try"), exaggerating Ray's histrionic vocal style. Ray was furious until he realized the success of Freberg's 1952 parody was helping sales and airplay of his own record.

Freberg's "Banana Boat (Day-O)" satirized Harry Belafonte's popular recording of "Banana Boat Song." In Freberg's version, the lead singer is forced to run down the hall and close the door after him to muffle the sound of his "Day-O!" because the beatnik bongo drummer complains, "It's too piercing, man!" When he gets to the lyric about "A beautiful buncha ripe banana/Hide the deadly black tarantula," the drummer protests, "I don't dig spiders, man!"

He also used the beatnik musician theme in a parody of "The Great Pretender," the hit by The Platters—who, like Belafonte and Welk, were not pleased. Freberg's musician was a pianist, an Erroll Garner devotee who rebels against playing a single-chord accompaniment. He retorts, "I'm not playing that 'pling-pling-pling jazz'!" But Freberg is adamant about the pianist's sticking to The Platters' style: "You play 'that pling-pling-pling jazz' or you don't get paid tonight!" The pianist relents—sort of.

Freberg's musical parodies were a byproduct of his collaborations with Billy May and his Capitol Records producer, Ken Nelson. With "Wun'erful! Wun'erful!", his 1957 spoof of TV "champagne music" master Lawrence Welk, Freberg had a true parody partner with May, a veteran big band musician and jazz arranger. To replicate Welk's syrupy sound, May and some of Hollywood's finest studio musicians and vocalists worked to clone Welk's musical mediocrity, right down to bad notes and timing mistakes. Billy Liebert, a first-rate accordionist, copied Welk's accordion playing. In the parody, the orchestra is overwhelmed by the malfunctioning bubble machine and eventually floats out to sea. Welk denied he had ever said "Wunnerful, Wunnerful!", yet it became the title of Welk's autobiography (Prentice Hall, 1971).

Freberg also tackled political issues of the day. On his radio show, an extended sketch paralleled the Cold War brinkmanship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union by portraying an ever-escalating public relations battle between the El Sodom and the Rancho Gomorrah, two casinos in the city of Los Varoces (Spanish for "The Greedy Ones"—a thinly disguised Las Vegas). The sketch ends with the ultimate tourist attraction, the Hydrogen Bomb, which turns Los Varoces into a barren, vast wasteland. Network pressure forced Freberg to remove the reference to the hydrogen bomb and had the two cities being destroyed by an earthquake instead. The version of "Incident at Los Varoces" released later on Capitol Records contains the original ending.[5]

On two occasions, Capitol balked at releasing Freberg's creations. "That's Right, Arthur" was a barbed parody of controversial 1950s radio/TV personality Arthur Godfrey, who expected his stable of performers—known as "little Godfreys"—to endlessly toady to him. The dialogue included Freberg's "Godfrey" monologue, punctuated by Daws Butler imitating Godfrey announcer Tony Marvin, repeatedly interjecting, "That's right, Arthur!" between Godfrey's comments.[6] Capitol feared Godfrey might take legal action. Capitol also rejected the equally acerbic "Most of the Town," a spoof on Ed Sullivan. Both eventually surfaced on a box-set Freberg retrospective issued by Rhino Records.

Freberg continued to skewer the advertising industry after the demise of his show, producing and recording "Green Chri$tma$" in 1958 (again with Butler), a scathing indictment of the overcommercialization of the holiday. Freberg, the son of a church minister and religious himself, made sure to soberly point out "whose birthday we're celebrating" on that record. Released originally on 45-rpm discs, the satire ended abruptly with a rendition of "Jingle Bells" punctuated by cash register sounds when reissued by Capitol on LP and CD. Freberg also revisited the Dragnet theme, with "Christmas Dragnet," in which the strait-laced detective convinces a character named "Grudge" that Santa Claus really exists. Daws Butler does several voices on that record.

In 1958, the Oregon Centennial Commission, under the sponsorship of Blitz Weinhard Brewing Company, hired Freberg to create a musical to celebrate Oregon's one-hundredth birthday. The result was Oregon! Oregon! A Centennial Fable in Three Acts. Recorded at Capitol in Hollywood, it was released during the Oregon Centennial in 1959 as a 12″ vinyl LP album. Side one featured two versions of an introduction by Freberg (billed as "Stan Freberg, Matinee Idol"), with the second version including a few words from the president of Blitz Weinhard Co. This was followed by the show itself, which runs for 21 minutes. Side two includes separate individual versions of each of the featured songs, including several variations on the title piece, "Oregon! Oregon!"

Fifty years later, as Oregon approaches its Sesquicentennial, an updated version is being prepared by Freberg and the Portland band Pink Martini as part of a signature series of performances throughout the state. Pink Martini will tour the state and perform four regional performances in the northern, southern, and central areas of Oregon in August and September 2009. This is being made possible by a grant from the Kinsman Foundation for a $40,000 launch of Pink Martini's "Oregon! Oregon! 2009" with Stan Freberg.

Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One: The Early Years (1961) combined dialogue and song in a musical theater format. The original album musical, released on Capitol, parodies the history of the United States from 1492 until the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.

Freberg parodied both large and small aspects of history. For instance, in the Colonial era, it was common to use the long s, which resembles a lowercase f, in the middle of words; thus, as Ben Franklin is reading the Declaration of Independence, he questions the passage, "Life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff?!?" He also takes the time to skewer McCarthyism, as his Franklin talks about "signing a few harmless documents, forgetting all about it, and years later finding oneself in front of a committee." Freberg blatantly skewered McCarthyism with "Point of Order," taken from Senator Joseph McCarthy's frequent objection, which executives truly feared to air. Freberg describes being called in for a chat about this and being asked whether he ever belonged to any "disloyal" group. "Well," he replied, "I have been for many years a member of…"—the executive went pale—"…the Mickey Mouse Fan Club." "Dammit, Freberg," the executive angrily retorted, "this isn't a game." The parody was eventually aired, and Freberg never found himself "in front of a committee." McCarthyism is also obliquely mocked in "Little Blue Riding Hood," his Joe Friday parody: "Only the color has been changed to prevent an investigation."

The album also featured the following exchange, where Freberg's Christopher Columbus is "discovered on beach here" by a Native American played by Marvin Miller. Skeptical of the Natives' diet of corn and "other organically grown vegetables," Columbus wants to open "America's first Italian restaurant" and needs to cash a check to get started:

  • Native: "You out of luck today. Banks closed."
  • Columbus: "Oh? Why?"
  • Native: "Columbus Day!"
  • Columbus: "Oh, yeah." [pregnant pause] "We going out on that joke?"
  • Native: "No, we do reprise of song. That help, but…"
  • Columbus and Native together: "Not much, no!"

Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume Two was planned for release during America's Bicentennial in 1976, but did not emerge until 1996.[7]

Freberg's early parodies revealed his obvious love of jazz. His portrayals of jazz musicians were usually stereotypical "beatnik" types, but jazz was always portrayed as preferable to pop, Calypso, and particularly the then-new form of music, rock and roll. He whopped doo-wop in his version of "Sh-Boom" and lampooned Elvis Presley with an echo/reverb rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel."

[edit] Radio

The popularity of Freberg's recordings landed him his own program, the situation comedy That's Rich. Freberg portrayed bumbling but cynical Richard E. Wilk, a resident of Hope Springs, where he worked for B.B. Hackett's Consolidated Paper Products Company. Freberg suggested the addition of dream sequences, which made it possible for him to perform his more popular Capitol Records satires before a live studio audience. The CBS series aired from January 8 to September 23, 1954.

The Stan Freberg Show was a 1957 replacement for Jack Benny on CBS radio. The satirical show, which featured elaborate production, included most of the team he used on his Capitol recordings, including June Foray, Peter Leeds, and Daws Butler. Billy May conducted and arranged the orchestra. The Jud Conlon Singers, who had also appeared on Freberg recordings, were regulars, as was singer Peggy Taylor, who had participated in his "Wun'erful, Wun'erful!" record.

The show failed to attract a sponsor after Freberg decided he did not want to be associated with the tobacco companies that had sponsored Benny. In lieu of actual commercials, Freberg mocked advertising by touting such products as "Puffed Grass" ("It's good for Bossie, it's good for me and you!"), "Food" ("Put some food in your tummy-tum-tum!"), and himself ("Stan Freberg—the foaming comedian! Bobba-bobba-bom-bom-bom"), a parody of the well-known Ajax cleanser commercial.

The lack of sponsorship was not the only issue; Freberg frequently complained of radio network interference. Another sketch from the CBS show, "Elderly Man River," anticipated the political correctness movement by decades. Daws Butler plays "Mr. Tweedly," a representative of a fictional citizens' radio review board, who constantly interrupts Freberg with a loud buzzer as Freberg attempts to sing "Old Man River." Tweedly objects first to the word "old," "which some of our more elderly citizens find distasteful." As a result, the song's lyrics are progressively and painfully distorted as Freberg struggles to turn the classic song into a form that Tweedly will find acceptable "to the tiny tots" listening at home: "He don't, er, doesn't plant 'taters, er, potatoes… he doesn't plant cotton, er, cotting… and them-these-those that plants them are soon forgotting," a lyric of which Freberg is particularly proud. Even when the censor finds Freberg's machinations acceptable, the constant interruption ultimately brings the song to a grinding halt (just before Freberg would have had to edit the line "You gets a little drunk and you lands in jail"), saying, "Take your finger off the button, Mr. Tweedly—we know when we're licked," furnishing the moral and the punch line of the sketch at once. The performance skewered political correctness about thirty years before the term even existed. But all of these factors forced the cancellation of the show after a run of only fifteen episodes.

In 1966, he recorded an album, Freberg Underground, in a format similar to his radio show, using the same cast and orchestra. He called it "pay radio," in a parallel to the phrase pay TV (the nickname at the time for subscription-based cable and broadcast television) "…because you have to go into the record store and buy it." This album is notable for giving Dr. Edward Teller the Father of the Year award for being "father of the hydrogen bomb" ("Use it in good health!"); for a combined satire of the Batman television series and the 1966 California Governor's race between Edmund G. "Pat" Brown and Ronald Reagan; and probably most famous for a bit in which, through the magic of sound effects, Freberg drained Lake Michigan and refilled it with hot chocolate and a mountain of whipped cream while a giant maraschino cherry was dropped like a bomb by the Royal Canadian Air Force to the cheers of 10,000 extras viewing from the shoreline.[8] Freberg concluded with, "Let's see them do that on television!" That bit became a commercial for advertising on radio.

[edit] Television

From 1949 to 1954, he and frequent collaborator Daws Butler provided voices and were the puppeteers for Bob Clampett's puppet series, Time for Beany, a triple Emmy Award winner (1950, 1951, 1953).

Freberg made television guest appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV variety shows, usually with Orville, his puppet from outer space. He reached through the bottom of Orville's flying saucer to control the puppet's movements and turned away from the camera when he delivered Orville's lines. Freberg garnered big laughs when he made occasional talk show appearances, but his big splash on television was his own ABC special: Stan Freberg Presents The Chun King Chow Mein Hour: Salute to the Chinese New Year (February 1962).

When Freberg introduced satire to the field of advertising, he revolutionized the industry, influencing staid ad agencies to imitate Freberg by injecting humor into their previously dead-serious commercials. Freberg's long list of successful ad campaigns includes:

  • Contadina tomato paste: "Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?"
  • Jeno's pizza rolls: A parody of the Lark cigarettes commercial that used the William Tell Overture, here ending with a confrontation between a cigarette smoker (supposedly representing the Lark commercial's announcer) and Clayton Moore as the Lone Ranger over the use of the music. Jay Silverheels also appears as Tonto, filling his saddlebag with pizza rolls. It was regarded as one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed TV ads of the period; after one showing on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson remarked that it was the first commercial he had ever seen to receive spontaneous applause from the studio audience.
  • Jeno's pizza, in a parody of Scope mouthwash commercials.
  • Sunsweet pitted prunes: Depicted as the "food of the future" in a futuristic setting, until science fiction icon Ray Bradbury, a friend of Freberg's (shown on a wall-to-wall television screen reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451) butts in: "I never mentioned prunes in any of my stories." "You didn't?" "No, never. I'm sorry to be so candid." "No, they're not candied," (rim shot). Bradbury reportedly refused to consider doing a commercial until Freberg told him, "I'm calling it Brave New Prune," prompting Bradbury to ask, "When do we start?"
  • Another Sunsweet commercial features Ronald Long as a picky eater: "They're still rather badly wrinkled, you know," and ends with the famous line, "Today, the pits; tomorrow, the wrinkles. Sunsweet marches on!"
  • Heinz Great American soups: Ann Miller is a housewife who turns her kitchen into a gigantic production number, singing such lyrics as "Let's face the chicken gumbo and dance!" After watching his wife's flashy tap dancing, her husband, played by veteran character actor Dave Willock, asks, "Why do you always have to make such a big production out of everything?" At the time (1970), this was the most expensive commercial ever made—so expensive, in fact, that there was little money left over to buy air time for it.[citation needed]
  • Jacobsen Mowers: Sheep slowly munch on a front lawn. On camera reporter/announcer (voice of William Woodson): "Jacobsen mowers. Faster… than sheep!"
  • Chun King Chinese Food: Magazine ad, featuring a lineup of nine smiling Chinese men and one frowning Caucasian man, all dressed in scrub suits and white lab coats, with the caption, "Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King Chow Mein!"

Today, these advertisements are considered classics by many critics. Though Bob & Ray had pioneered intentionally comic advertisements (stemming from a hugely successful campaign for Piels beer), Stan Freberg is usually credited as being the first person to introduce humor into television advertising with memorable campaigns. Freberg felt a truly funny commercial would cause consumers to request a product, as was the case with his elaborate ad campaign that prompted stores to stock Salada tea. The owner of Jeno's Pizza Rolls had to pay off a bet over the success of a Freberg ad campaign by pulling Freberg in a rickshaw on Hollywood's La Cienega Boulevard. Freberg won 21 Clio awards for his commercials.[9] Many of those spots were included in the Freberg four-CD box set Tip of the Freberg.

[edit] Later work

Following his success in comedy records and television, Freberg was often invited to appear as a featured guest at various events. Each time has been memorable, such as his skit at the 1979 Science Fiction Awards, again playing straight man to Orville in his UFO. He innocently asks why there is a hole in the end of the spacecraft, only to be told, "That's where the swamp gas comes out."

In his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, Freberg recounts much of his life and early career, including his encounters with such show business legends as Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, and Ed Sullivan, and the struggles he endured to get his material on the air.

Freberg was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995. From 1995 until October 6, 2006, Freberg hosted When Radio Was, a syndicated anthology of vintage radio shows. The release of the 1996 Rhino CD The United States of America Volume 1 (the Early Years) and Volume 2 (the Middle Years) suggests a possible third volume. This set includes some parts written but cut because they would not fit on a record album.

Freberg appeared on "Weird Al" Yankovic's The Weird Al Show, playing both the J.B. Toppersmith character and the voice of the puppet Papa Boolie. His son, Donavan Freberg, played the voice of the puppet Baby Boolie. Yankovic has many times acknowledged Freberg as his greatest influence.[10] Freberg is among the commentators in the special features on the multiple-volume DVD sets of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection and narrates the documentary "Irreverent Imagination" on Volume 1.

[edit] Legacy in popular culture

  • In 2007, comedian the great Luke Ski recorded a ten-minute homage called MC Freberg, a parody illustrating what a Freberg-type satire of rap music would have sounded like. Originally recorded for The FuMP, the track also appears on Ski's album BACONspiracy.
  • In the episode "Duke's Oil" from the short-lived animated series The Critic, millionaire Duke Phillips pays a Dr. Kevorkian-like suicide specialist to help him euthanize himself after dying of an illness. When given the choice of his last rites, the nurse tells him he "can listen to Stan Freberg on the headphones," to which Duke replies, "The perfect end to a perfect life."
  • Was the announcer for the boat race in the movie version of Stuart Little.

[edit] Discography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Pipes, Rusty. "An audience with Stan Freberg," Cosmik Debris
  2. ^ Freberg, Stan. It Only Hurts When I Laugh. Times Books, 1988.
  3. ^ IMDb
  4. ^ POV
  5. ^ Bevilacqua, Joe. "The Stan Freberg Show"
  6. ^ Arthur Godfrey satire
  7. ^ Stan Freberg Discography
  8. ^ "The Tip of the Freberg: The Stan Freberg Collection 1951-1998: Stretching the Imagination". Retrieved on 2008-08-21. "[audio excerpt from Stretching the Imagination]"
  9. ^ Award to be Presented to Freberg at the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards (June 22, 2006)
  10. ^ Yahoo! Music: Weird Al Yankovic Biography

[edit] Listen to

[edit] External links


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