Looks like I'm not going to have time today to post more than this. Hey, don't look at me like that. I posted plenty of content last week.
A couple of folks online are disputing my claim that Stan Freberg had the longest career of anyone who ever did cartoon voices. They say June Foray has been doing it longer. That would be true if you believe the earliest credits for June that are listed in the Internet Movie Database but I do not and at least when I co-authored her autobiography, June didn't either. Both Stan and June did their last cartoon voice work last year — in 2014. Stan, we know, did his first in 1945 for cartoons that were released in 1946.
There is some dispute over what June's first cartoon was. Her first inarguable credit was in Cinderella, which was released in 1950. I don't know when she recorded her part but it probably wasn't before 1948. There are three or four earlier cartoons in which people think they've heard her but I don't think any of them are her. To get a second opinion, I played some of them for her and she said, "That's not me."
Of course, June is still with us so it's not impossible she could do further work that would best Freberg's record. If she doesn't, it might be a long time before anyone else could. I can't think of a single other person currently doing cartoon voices who did them in the forties or fifties. There are a few from the mid-sixties. Perhaps around the year 2036, one of them will match Stan's longevity.
There have been an awful lot of articles posted online about Stan Freberg in the last few days. Here are a few…
"HeGeek" (who I think is someone named Ray Smotherman but I'm not sure) wrote about a thrilling encounter with Stan.
Sean Daniels, who works a lot in American theater, wrote a piece called "How I Learned Comedy (from Stan Freberg and sugar)."
Robert Lloyd has a good essay in the L.A. Times about the importance of Stan's work.
Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post has another good piece.
Animation historian Don M. Yowp has some thoughts about Stan and some great old articles.
Lastly, his wife Hunter — who took such very good care of him — penned a poignant essay about their relationship. I got to know them pretty well and I have never seen another couple more in love.
Our pal Kliph Nesteroff has just posted an engaging interview with Dick Cavett. It's mostly about Cavett's days as a stand-up comedian and as a writer for The Tonight Show.
Last week on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden, mainly about the ability of the U.S. government to spy on male citizens' dick pics. The folks at Politifact fact-checked what Snowden said and they gave it a rating of Mostly True.
So: 34 or 35 years after he'd recorded Volume One of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Stan Freberg began preparing to record Volume Two. I got to help…a little. Very little. I'll tell you in a moment how little.
One of the things I learned about Stan — and this is by no means a criticism — is that as a creative individual, he made up his mind how something should be and then he achieved it. When he produced advertising, his contracts often said something like, "Mr. Freberg shall be the sole judge of whether something is funny." If you hired Stan, he did what he did and you just had to accept it…or not.
I have worked with other people — some, very talented — who tried to create that kind of "my way or the highway" situation and it can be painful. It's bad enough to watch someone drive off the cliff but it's worse when there were people around who warned them…or still worse, were not allowed to. Somehow, doing it His Way, Stan managed to produce a stunning lifetime body of memorable work.
He was not insistent on His Way when he worked for others on their projects. When he came in to do voices on cartoon shows I voice-directed for example, he was totally cooperative and eager to please. He was also very good and his presence in the studio — and I am not kidding about this — made the other actors better. In the last few days since Stan left us, several of those actors have written to me to say how working with Stan Freberg was among the greatest thrills of their lives…and very, very educational.
However: On a Stan Freberg endeavor, everything had to be to the liking of Stan Freberg. I always thought one of the reasons he preferred radio to television was that he had more control in radio. With his gift for voices and ability to do multiple roles, it was easier to make things sound the way he wanted than to get them to look the way he wanted.
As I said above, I did very little, emphasis on the "very." This is a first-person narrative of my involvement because I was in a unique position to watch a master at work. If it sounds like I'm saying I deserve some credit for the resultant album, look closer. I did nothing that substantially affected the end-product. You couldn't. Stan Freberg making a Stan Freberg record was like Arnold Palmer playing golf. You could drive him to the golf course. You could carry his clubs. But he was the only one who was going to hit the ball.
His producer was his wife Donna, who had been the producer on just about everything he'd done for the past few decades. One of the reasons she was the ideal producer for him was that she made no attempt to interfere with content. I'll tell you in the next part some of the things she told me about what it was like to be Stan's producer but the main one was: "Stan has to make the record Stan wants to make the way he wants to make it."
Which is not to say he was not willing to question his own work, decide something wasn't right and change it…but he was going to be the one changing it. Most of the material for Volume Two of S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A. was written not long after he recorded Volume One. When it came time to at long last record it, Stan went back and rewrote a number of lines that seemed dated. With the hindsight of several decades, he also altered or discarded portions he no longer liked. The passing of time dictated other changes: He had tentatively cast all the roles with the same stock company he used on Volume One but some of those folks were no longer available.
The great Paul Frees had provided the super-authoritative voice of the Narrator. You may remember how he sounded…
Alas, the great Paul Frees was now the late Paul Frees. Stan wanted a sound-alike for consistency and was about 95% convinced no human being alive could properly replicate that voice. He said to me, "I may have to listen to Paul over and over and learn how to imitate that voice myself." In his youth, I'll bet Stan could have done it. He was an incredible mimic. But I told him I had The Guy.
When you go to Disneyland and ride Pirates of the Caribbean or visit The Haunted Mansion, you hear the original, ominous vocal stylings of Mr. Frees recorded way back when. But over the years as those attractions have changed, it was deemed necessary to change a few lines. The new lines were seamlessly inserted and they were done by Mr. Corey Burton.
At the time Stan asked me to help him make Volume Two happen, I was casting voices for a proposed (but ultimately unrealized) new cartoon show. I had already decided on Stan for one of the lead roles and had Corey in mind for another. I had to have them both come in and record audition material so that the Executive Producer could sign off on my selections so I scheduled them back-to-back. One afternoon, I recorded Stan and then asked to him to stick around as Corey arrived.
I think Stan was expecting that the guy I said could do a perfect Paul Frees would be older and scowling and would look like Orson Welles…or at least, Paul. Corey is a short, pleasant-looking younger fellow. When he arrived and I introduced him, Stan gave him a look of withering skepticism, then took me aside and said, "Are you sure he can sound like Paul?" I grinned like a guy with four aces: "Just listen!" (By the way, I am not claiming a lot of credit for this bit of casting. Anyone who knew anything about the current talent pool for voice actors would have known Corey was the go-to guy when you needed Paul Frees. It's just that Stan didn't.)
Corey went into the booth, got on the microphone and began warming up. I was on the other side of the glass, next to the audio engineer, and Stan was next to me. Over the speakers, we heard The Voice saying, "Stan Freberg…modestly presents…the United States of America." It sounded, of course, perfect and I turned to Stan, waiting for him to say, "My God, you were right!"
Instead, he said, "Okay, now I want to hear him." He thought he was listening to a reference recording of Paul Frees.
I said, "That is him." I pushed the button so Corey could hear me and asked him to do some different lines in the same voice. He said, still sounding exactly like Paul Frees, "Sure, Mark…what do you want me to say?"
That was when Stan said, "My God, you were right." In an interview later, he said, "When I realized it was him and not Paul, I got cold chills. I would have bet anything that was Paul." Here is Corey Burton on the final album…
See what I mean?
The three other major performers besides Stan on Volume One were Jesse White, Peter Leeds and Byron Kane. Back in 196whatever, Stan had designated major roles on Volume Two for all three of them but Byron had also died. Lorenzo Music filled his parts, and since I had voice-directed Lorenzo on Garfield cartoons — occasionally guest-starring Stan — everyone, including Lorenzo, assumed I had cast him. Nope. That was all Stan's doing.
Peter Leeds was alive and available. So was Jesse White but I'd worked with Jesse not long before on Garfield. I loved the guy so I will say this as politely as I can: He was not in good health and he was not up to the kind of performance Stan needed from him. Since I'd just been proven right about Corey, Stan trusted me on this. He gave Jesse a small cameo role on Volume Two and selected David Ogden Stiers to play the other parts for which Jesse had been penciled in.
It was very sad the day Jesse recorded. He was failing and it took many takes to get anything even remotely useable. One of our engineers said to Stan, "Guess you're going to have to have someone else redo that part."
Stan said, "No. Jesse was a big reason why Volume One was so successful. I want him to be a part of this one and besides, that may be Jesse's last performance and I'd never forgive myself if I threw away his last performance." It may indeed have been Jesse's last because he passed away not long after Volume Two was released and so did Peter Leeds.
From the original album, Stan also managed to bring back June Foray and there was one other cast member we couldn't find. Shepard Menken played a number of roles and was probably eager to be part of Volume Two. I say that because several years earlier, I'd directed him on an episode of Garfield and Friends and we'd talked about his involvement in S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A., which he said was one of the items on his résumé of which he was the proudest. He told me, "Stan keeps talking about recording Volume Two and I hope he calls me for it."
Unfortunately, when that time came, no one could locate Mr. Menken. After Donna gave up looking, I was assigned to track him down but his agent told me, as he'd told her, "I don't know where he is. Shep's kind of dropped off the face of the earth." Someone at the Screen Actors Guild told me, "If you find him, let us know. We have checks for him that came back to us marked 'No longer at this address.'" He was eventually located but not in time to be on Volume Two. He passed away in 1999.
Stan and Donna however assembled a fine ensemble to support the returning players. In addition to Peter Leeds, Lorenzo Music and David Ogden Stiers, they booked Naomi Lewis, William Woodson, Stan's son Donavan and his daughter Donna Jean. The investors and the folks at Rhino Records wanted some "star names" as cast insurance for a project they knew would be costly so Stan and Donna recruited Tyne Daly, Sherman Hemsley, John Goodman and Harry Shearer. All were folks who'd told Stan how much they loved Volume One. Billy May, who'd arranged and conducted the music for Volume One, went to work on Volume Two.
So with the script, cast and music in place, Stan Freberg finally did something that fans and friends had been urging him to do for thirty-five years. He went into a recording studio to record Volume Two of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. In what was very much a "dream come true" moment for me, I got to be there. In the next part, I'll tell you what I observed and how little I did.
As you'll see, my biggest contribution involved distracting Ray Bradbury who dropped by to urge Stan to insert some lines about how Bill Clinton was destroying the real United States of America. As you'll also see, even Stan's close friend Ray Bradbury couldn't persuade Stan to do anything Stan didn't want to do. Next time.
My pal Ken Levine complained about situation comedies — and this probably applies to other kinds of shows, though it's done most often with sitcoms — being sped up in syndication. He references this article over on Slate that shows you examples and lets you test to see if you can tell the difference.
I agree with everything Ken says…though I have to admit I didn't do so well on Slate's test. I'm also wondering if the speed-ups aren't the lesser of two bad choices, the other being to merely hack a minute or three out of the shows. No, I don't want to watch shows sped-up. I also don't want to watch them incomplete. If I absolutely have to pick between those two options, I think some speed-ups might be preferable to most editing.
Of course, picking from two bad choices always leaves you with a bad choice. There are a few other options which remain largely untried…
One is to run the shows uncut and unsped and just forget about this concept of half-hours. That would mean that after you roll in the requisite number of commercials, a show might start at 9:00 and end at 9:36 and the next one would start at 9:37. The entire schedule would be full of shows that began at 5:22 and 7:53 and rarely on the hour or half-hour. I'm not sure how viewers would take to this. Since I watch almost everything TiVoed, I'd be fine with it assuming the info on start/stop times made available to DVRs was precise. Given how often the times on ordinary broadcast television are off a minute or two, I'm skeptical this could be accomplished.
Another possibility is to let shows run their full, unsped length but to pad things out to round numbers. Years ago, someone announced they were going to do one of those classic sitcom channels and run everything uncut, including the credits. What they were going to do was to pad every 30-minute show to 45 with little interstitial segments. Like, they'd run a Dick Van Dyke Show at 10:00 and then a M*A*S*H at 10:45 and in-between, they'd have little spots where they'd interview people who worked on the shows and/or run clips of particularly golden moments.
They were confident viewers could cope with show starting fifteen and forty-five minutes after the hour. Well, maybe. But that idea never happened, I think because they found it too expensive to produce the filler material. I wonder though if viewers would have waited through those time-wasting segments or if they'd have started changing channels, looking for a real show that was starting now instead of in fifteen minutes.
Cartoon Network and its sister station Boomerang seem to do an amalgam of these two methods…but they, of course, have two advantages. One is that their library includes zillions of short cartoons of all different lengths. A sitcom network doesn't have loads of five-minute and seven-minute situation comedies. Also of course, a lot of their viewership is kids who've been parked in front of the set to watch whatever's on. It does not seem to affect their audience that the start times on so many of their shows are off a few minutes, either early or late.
Lastly, there's one other method which I don't think anyone has really tried: Fewer commercials. Run the shows with the number of ads they were originally intended to have.
This may sound akin to heresy but as streaming services become more plentiful and popular, regular ol' broadcast television is going to have to consider that as a way to compete. I wonder if anyone has tested something. Would viewers today pay more attention (or if they're watching on DVRs, not skip ahead) if commercial breaks were one minute as opposed to three or four? I sure don't watch many of the commercials in the shows I watch on MeTV or Antenna TV or other channels that run old shows.
I wonder what would happen if a station adopted a policy: Commercial breaks would be no longer than one minute during shows and two minutes between programs. It might take a while for viewers to get accustomed to that but once they did, might there be data to suggest that a commercial in a one-minute break on that station was two or three times more valuable than one buried in a three-minute break? I'll reach for my remote to jump through three minutes of ads. I might not bother to avoid one minute.
I dunno. I'm just throwing this out there. Maybe not enough folks watch on DVRs and know how to skip ahead…now. But that will probably change. If I were buying ad time during TV shows to sell my product, I might think it was worth paying a little more for an ad that fewer viewers were fast-forwarding through. Then again, I watch most of my favorite old TV shows via boxed sets of DVDs or Blu-Rays. That's really the answer to this whole problem.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Freberg last did voice work for cartoons. It was 2014, not 2011.
That's one thing I like about the Times. They're really good about this kind of thing. I don't know any other newspaper — and certainly not any news program on TV — that is so diligent about atoning for that which they get wrong.
Jonathan Chait on Dick Cheney's increasingly irrational attacks on Barack Obama. And while you're over there, read Chait on Rand Paul's promise to be the next coming on Ronald Reagan.
Let's go back to Comic-Con International in 2012. As usual, I hosted a panel on Cartoon Voices on Saturday morning of the con. We had a great panel including — you'll see a brief shot of him in this video — Chuck McCann. About twenty minutes from the end though, I brought on a Surprise Guest to a thunderous standing ovation. It was Stan Freberg and the audience just loved him. Here's an excerpt from his appearance…
