Stan Freberg
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Stanley Victor Freberg (born August 7, 1926 in Los Angeles) is an American author, recording artist, animation voice actor, comedian, 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 which 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]
Freberg has two children, Donna Jr. (Donna Jean Ebsen, named after her mother, Donna) and Donavan Freberg, who was given his name on his fifth birthday. Before that he was simply known as "Baby Boy." Donavan Freberg explained, "As for how they decided on Donavan, my sister is named Donna, as was my mother. My dad had writer's block, so he just elongated Donna. Until then, they called me baby boy, a name I shared with the family dog, a freakishly small but very cute Yorkshire terrier." [2] Stan Freberg's first wife, Donna, died in 2000, and he married Betty Hunter in 2002.
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[edit] Animation
Freberg was employed as a voice actor in animation shortly after graduating from high school. He began at Warner Bros. in 1946 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. He did this, got off the bus when he saw a sign that said "talent agency," walked in and immediately found work at Warner Bros., as he described in his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Times Books, 1988). [3]
His first was Roughly Speaking (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 and Bertie and Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. [4] He was the voice of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes cartoon What's Brewin', Bruin? (1948), featuring Jones' version of The Three Bears.
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).
His first credit as a voice actor in a Looney Tunes cartoon was in Three Little Bops (1957). Freberg's work as a voice actor for Walt Disney Productions included the role of Beaver in Lady and the Tramp (1955).
[edit] Capitol Records
Also in 1950, he scored a huge success with his first recording for Capitol Records, "John and Marsha," a soap opera parody that consisted of the title characters (both played by Freberg) repeating each other's names. In a follow-up, he used pedal steel guitarist Speedy West to parody the 1953 Ferlin Husky country hit, "A Dear John Letter", changing it to "A Dear John and Marsha Letter" (Capitol 2677).)
Throughout the 1950s, he made a name for himself by writing and performing original satirical ("Tele-Vee-Shun") and parodies of popular tunes ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Day-O", "I've Got You Under My Skin", and others). With Daws Butler and June Foray, he produced a medieval parody of Dragnet called "St. George and the Dragonet". The latter recording was a #1 hit for four weeks in late 1953, and prompted the follow-up success of the record's B-side "Little Blue Riding Hood," in which the title character is arrested for smuggling goodies.
Freberg's musical parodies were a byproduct of his collaborations with Billy May and his Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson. With his 1957 spoof of TV "champagne music" master Lawrence Welk, "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!", Freberg had a true partner in crime with May, a veteran big band musician and jazz arranger (known for his work with Frank Sinatra among others), who loathed Welk's corny and syrupy style. To replicate that sound, May and some of Hollywood's finest studio musicians and vocalists worked to virtually clone Welk's musical mediocrity, right down to the bad notes and timing mistakes. Billy Liebert, a first-rate accordionist, copied Welk's own abysmal accordion playing. Welk denied he had ever said "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!", yet it became the title of Welk's autobiography, published by Prentice Hall in 1971.
Another hit song 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 intense, histrionic vocal style. Ray was furious, until he realized the success of Freberg's parody was helping sales and airplay of his own record.
Freberg also tackled political issues of the day. One extended sketch paralleled the Cold War gamesmanship between the USA 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 Voraces (Spanish for "The Greedy Ones" -- a thinly-disguised Las Vegas). The sketch ends with the ultimate tourist attraction, The Hydrogen Bomb, which turns Los Voraces into a barren, vast wasteland. Network pressure forced Freberg to remove the reference to the hydrogen bomb and destroy the two cities with an earthquake, instead. The version of "Incident at Los Voraces", released later on Capitol Records, contains the original ending. [5]
On two occasions, however, 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 comments. 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 very religious, himself, made sure to soberly point out "whose birthday we're celebrating" on that record.
Green Chri$tma$ also foreshadowed Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume One: The Early Years (1961), in that both combined dialogue and song in a musical-like style. (One can almost imagine Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin performing the big Broadway finish on "A Man Can't Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days"). "Stan Freberg Presents... Volume 1" was released on Capitol. It is a parody of the history of the United States from 1492 until the end of the Revolutionary War in 1776. For instance, in the Colonial era, it was common to use the long s, which resembles a lowercase f -- thus, as Ben Franklin is reading the Declaration of Independence, he questions the passage "Life, liberty and the purfuit of happineff???"
There was a little exchange, as Freberg's Christopher Columbus is "discovered on beach here" by a Native American played by Marvin Miller. Being 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 a release during America's Bicentennial in 1976 but did not emerge until 1996. [6]
Freberg's early parodies revealed his obvious love of jazz. His portrayals of jazz musicians were usually stereotypic "beatnik" types, but jazz was always portrayed as somehow "nobler" than pop, calypso and particularly the then-new form of music, rock and roll. He whopped doo wop in his parody of "Sh-Boom", and Elvis Presley was lampooned with a echo/reverb rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel". His contempt for Presley, as well as skiffle vocalist Lonnie Donegan, whom he spoofed with his 1956 recording of "Rock Island Line", reflected a scorn for changing times or diverse tastes, be it Welk or rock.
[edit] Radio
The popularity of Freberg's recordings landed him his own program, the situation comedy That's Rich (1954). Freberg portrayed the 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, Paul Frees and Daws Butler. Billy May conducted and arranged the orchestra. The Jud Conlon Singers, who also appeared on Freberg recordings, were also regulars.
The show failed to attract a sponsor after Freberg decided he did not want to be associated with the tobacco companies who 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 which Tweedly will find acceptable "to the tiny tots" listening at home: "He don't, er, doesn't plant 'taters, er, potatoes... he doesn't pick cotton, er, cotting... and them-these-those that plants them is 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"), furnishing the moral and the punchline 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 15 episodes.
After the radio show, he created an album, which was supposed to be similar to his radio show. This album is most famous for a bit in which, through the magic of sound effects, Freberg drained Lake Michigan and refilled it with hot chocolate, whipped cream, and a cherry, saying, "Let's see them do that on television!" That became a commercial for advertising on radio.
[edit] Television
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 Chung King Chow Mein Hour (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 a contemporary commercial for Lark cigarettes 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.
- 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 tap-dancing housewife, whose husband 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.
- Jacobson Mowers: Sheep slowly munch on a front lawn. On camera reporter/announcer: "Jacobson mowers. Faster... than sheep!"
- Encyclopædia Britannica: The boy in these commercials is Freberg's son Donavan. Freberg talks to him from offscreen.
Today, these advertisements are considered classics by many critics, and 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 which 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. [7] 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 has often been 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 show business legends such 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 old-time 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 J.B. Toppersmith character and the voice of the puppet Papa Boolie. Yankovic has many times acknowledged Freberg as his greatest influence. [8] Freberg is among the commentators in the special features on the multiple-volume DVD sets of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection.
[edit] Discography
[edit] Reference
- ^ Pipes, Rusty. "An audience with Stan Freberg," Cosmik Debris
- ^ Freberg, Donavan. Demented Tidbits
- ^ Freberg, Stan. It Only Hurts When I Laugh. Times Books, 1988.
- ^ IMDb
- ^ Bevilacqua, Joe. "The Stan Freberg Show"
- ^ Stan Freberg Discography
- ^ Award to be Presented to Freberg at the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards (June 22, 2006)
- ^ Yahoo! Music: Weird Al Yankovic Biography
[edit] Listen to
- OTR Network Library: The Stan Freberg Show (15 episodes)
- Stan Freberg interviewed by Don Swaim (1989)
