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Stanley Victor Freberg (born August 7, 1926 in Los Angeles) is a U.S. voice actor, comedian, and advertising creative.

The son of a Baptist minister, 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 (which was to be an impediment to his radio career when he took over for Jack Benny on CBS radio in the early 1960s as Benny moved to television.)

Stan has two children, Donna Jr. (Donna Jean Ebsen, named after her mother Donna, who passed away in 2000) and Donavan Freberg (who was given his name on his fifth birthday, before that he was simply known as baby boy). Freberg married Betty Hunter in 2002.

Stan Freberg began as a voice actor in a number of old-time radio shows and in animation as well. He won his first part by taking the advice of his uncle, a stage 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.

At the age of 21, he was cast as the voice of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones' 1948 Looney Tunes cartoon What's Brewin', Bruin?, featuring Jones' version of The Three Bears. He often found himself paired off with Mel Blanc while at Warner Bros., where the two men performed such pairs as the Goofy Gophers, Hubie and Bertie, and Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. Freberg also worked for Walt Disney Productions as a voice actor for films such as Lady and the Tramp (1955).

During 1950-1955, he and frequent collaborator Daws Butler provided voices and were the puppeteers for Bob Clampett's puppet series, Time for Beany, a triple Emmy winner (1950, 1951, 1953), later adapted for animation as Beany and Cecil. Butler and Freberg had no involvement with the cartoon version.

Capitol Records

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" as "A Dear John and Marsha Letter."

Throughout the 1950s he made a name for himself writing and performing both original songs ("Tele-Vee-Shun") and parodies of popular tunes ("The Yellow Rose of Texas", "Day-O", "Heartbreak Hotel"). 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.

Freberg's brilliant, authentic-sounding musical parodies were a byproduct of his collaborations with Billy May and his Capitol Records producer Ken Nelson. His brilliant 1957 spoof of TV "champagne music" master Lawrence Welk, "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!" was a true collaboration with May, a veteran big band musician and jazz arranger (known for his work with Frank Sinatra among others) who loathed Welk's corny 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. The humor was totally lost on Welk; Freberg later recalled the bandleader denying he ever used the term "Wunnerful! Wunnerful!" (later the title of Welk's autobiography).

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; Ray and Freberg actually became close friends.

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 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.

On two occasions, however, Capitol balked at releasing Freberg spoofs. "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. They 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 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 point out on that novelty record "Whose birthday we're celebrating." Despite his Jewish-sounding last name, Freberg is actually a Baptist of Swedish heritage.

Green Chri$tma$ also foreshadowed Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One The Early Years (1961) in that both combined dialog 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"). Then there was this 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.

If there was any problem with Freberg's early parodies, it involved his obvious love of jazz and contempt for anything beyond that idiom. 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 rock and roll. He clearly disliked the Chords/Crew Cuts' hit "Sh-Boom!" and Elvis Presley as well as skiffle vocalist Lonnie Donegan who he parodied with his 1956 recording of "Rock Island Line" reflected a scorn for changing times or diverse tastes, be it Lawrence Welk or Rock and Roll.

Radio

The popularity of Freberg's recordings landed him his own program, the situation comedy That's Rich (1954), followed by The Stan Freberg Show, on CBS Radio in 1957. The satirical show, which featured elaborate production including 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 and the Jud Conlon Singers, who also appeared on many of the Freberg recordings, were also regulars.

The show failed to attract a sponsor, however, at least in part because Freberg did not want to be associated with the tobacco companies who had sponsored Jack Benny, whose time slot he inherited. In lieu of actual advertisements, Freberg mocked commercials in general by "advertising" such products as "Puffed Grass" ("It's good for Bossie, it's good for me and you!"), "Food" ("If you haven't any teeth you can gum your food with your gum, gum, gummy-gum gum"), and himself ("Freberg — the foaming comedian! Bobba bobba bom bom bom" — a parody of a well-known Ajax laundry detergent commercial).

The lack of sponsorship was not the only issue. Freberg frequently complained of network interference. Another sketch from the CBS radio show, entitled "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 "Ol' Man River," accompanied by the orchestra of his longtime collaborator Billy May. Tweedly objects first to the titular 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 get a little drunk and you land in jail"), furnishing the moral and the punch line of the sketch at once. The performance skewered Political Correctness before the term existed. All 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.

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 movements and turned away from the camera when he delivered Orville's lines. Freberg also 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 brought 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. (See the Watch section below for the two 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 redolescent 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 Salada Tea ads which prompted stores to stock the product. The owner of Jeno's Pizza Rolls had to pay off a bet over the success of a Freberg ad campaign by drawing Freberg up La Cienega Boulevard in Hollywood in a rickshaw. Freberg won 21 Clio awards for his commercials, and many of those spots were included in the Freberg 4 CD box set, Tip Of The Freberg.

Later work

From 1995 until October 6, 2006, Freberg hosted When Radio Was, a syndicated anthology of old-time radio shows.

Freberg was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

1996 Release of the Rhino CD The United States of America Volume 1 (the Early Years) and Volume 2 (the Middle Years) which suggests a possible 3rd volume. This set includes some parts written, but cut because they would not fit on a record album, produced from the original script and added to Volume 1.

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.

In his autobiography It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Times Books, 1988), Freberg recounts much of his life and career, including his encounters with show biz legends such as Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan and the struggles he endured with radio and TV networks to get his material on the air.

Freberg is among the commentators in the special features on the multiple-volume DVD sets of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection.

Discography

• Stan Freberg Discography

Watch

• Ann Miller in Great American Soup commercial (1970)
• Butter-Nut Coffee animated commercial
• Jeno's Pizza Roll commercial (1960s)
  • Lark commercial spoofed by Freberg in his Jeno's commercial (1960's)

External links

• Mark Thomas Presents: Stan Freberg (BBC Radio 4, 2005)
• So Who Is Stan Freberg?
• Time: "Stan the Man" (July 29, 1957)

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