Stan Freberg (born Stanley Friberg; August 7, 1926 – April 7, 2015) was an American actor and entertainer.
His best-known works include "St. George and the Dragonet", Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, his role on the television series Time for Beany, multiple characters in the Looney Tunes such as Pete Puma and Bertie, and a number of classic television commercials.
Early and personal life Freberg was born Stanley Friberg on August 7, 1926, in Pasadena, California, the son of Evelyn Dorothy (née Conner), a housewife, and Victor Richard Friberg (later Freberg), a Baptist minister. Freberg was of Swedish and Irish descent.
He was drafted in the US Army from 1945 to 1947, where he served in Special Services attached to the Medical Corps at McCornack General Hospital in Pasadena, California.
Freberg's work reflected 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:
Freberg's first wife, Donna, died in 2000. He had two children from that marriage, Donna Jean and Donavan Freberg. He married Betty Hunter in 2001.
Animation Freberg began his career doing impersonations on Cliffie Stone's radio show in 1943. Freberg was employed as a voice actor in animation shortly after graduating from Alhambra High School. He began at Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1944 by getting on a bus and asking the driver to let him off "in Hollywood". As he describes in his autobiography, It Only Hurts When I Laugh, he got off the bus and found a sign that said "talent agency". He walked in, and the agents there arranged for him to audition for Warner Bros. cartoons where he was promptly hired. Thus began Freberg's professional career in entertainment, which lasted for more than 70 years, all the way up to his death.
His first notable cartoon voice work was in a Warner Bros. cartoon called For He's a Jolly Good Fala, which was recorded but never filmed (due to the death of Fala's owner, President Franklin D. Roosevelt),The Clampett-Freberg-Lorre Connection followed by Roughly Squeaking (1946) as Bertie; and in 1947, he was heard in It's a Grand Old Nag (Charlie Horse), produced and directed by Bob Clampett for Republic Pictures; Goofy Gophers (Tosh), and One Meat Brawl (Grover Groundhog and Walter Winchell).
Freberg voiced the character of Junyer Bear, but the role was actually created by actor Kent Rogers in Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears (1944). After Rogers was killed during World War II, Freberg assumed the role of Junyer Bear in Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes cartoon What's Brewin', Bruin? (1948). This featured Jones' version of The Three Bears.
He often found himself paired with Mel Blanc while at Warner Bros., where the two men performed such pairs as the mice Hubie and Bertie, the Goofy Gophers Mac and Tosh, and Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier. In 1952, he was the voice of Friz Freleng's "Dumb Dog" in Foxy by Proxy, who meets up with a disguised Bugs Bunny wearing a fox suit. He was the voice of Pete Puma in the 1952 cartoon Rabbit's Kin, in which he did an impression of an early Frank Fontaine characterization (which later became Fontaine's "Crazy Guggenheim" character).
Freberg's work as a voice actor for Walt Disney Productions included the role of Mr. Busy the Beaver in Lady and the Tramp (1955), and he did voice work in Susie the Little Blue Coupe and Lambert the Sheepish Lion. He received screen credit for his voice work on Three Little Bops (1957), where he voiced all the characters and sang the titular song. Freberg's interpretation of Pete Puma also provided the basis for Daws Butler's voice of Sam, the orange cat paired with Sylvester in the Academy Award-nominated short Mouse and Garden (1960). He voiced Cage E. Coyote, the father of Wile E. Coyote, in the 2000 short Little Go Beep.
Films Freberg was cast to sing the part of the Jabberwock in the song "Beware the Jabberwock" for Disney's Alice in Wonderland, with the Rhythmaires and Daws Butler. Written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul, the song was a musical rendering of the poem "Jabberwocky" from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. The song was not included in the final film, but a demo recording was included in the 2004 and 2010 DVD releases of the film.
Freberg made his film debut 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). Freberg costarred with Mala Powers in Geraldine (1954) as sobbing singer Billy Weber, enabling him to reprise his satire on vocalist Johnnie Ray (see below). In 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Freberg appeared in a non-speaking role as the Deputy Sheriff and acted as the voice of a dispatcher.
Contrary to popular belief, George Lucas called upon Freberg, not Mel Blanc, to audition for the voice of the character C-3PO for the 1977 film Star Wars. After he and many others auditioned for the part, Freberg suggested that Lucas use mime actor Anthony Daniels' voice.
Capitol Records Early releases Freberg was one of the talents recruited by Capitol Records when it launched its spoken-word division. He began on February 10, 1951, and produced satirical recordings about popular culture. One of his most notable releases was "John and Marsha", a soap opera parody that consisted of the title characters (both played by Freberg) doing nothing but repeating each other's names (with intonations to match the moods). Some radio stations refused to play "John & Marsha", believing it to be an actual romantic conversation between two real people. 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).
Another hit to receive the Freberg treatment was Johnnie Ray's weepy "Cry", which Freberg rendered as "Try", exaggerating Ray's histrionic vocal style. Johnnie Ray was furious until he realized the success of Freberg's 1952 parody was actually increasing sales and airplay of his own record.According to Freberg, years later Ray told him, "I wanted to thank you for keeping my career going for another five or ten years because long after DJs stopped playing my records, they would continue to play you lampooning me". Hansen, Barry and Freberg, Stan, Tip of the Freberg: The Stan Freberg Collection 1951–1998 (1999), , notes booklet, p. 10. Freberg reported getting more angry feedback for this than from any of his other parodies.
With Daws Butler and June Foray, Freberg produced his 1953 Dragnet parody, "St. George and the Dragonet", a No. 1 hit for four weeks in October 1953. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc.
After "I've Got You Under My Skin" (1951), he followed with more popular musical satires, such as "Sh-Boom" (1954), a parody of the song recorded by The Chords. At the end, he yells "STELLA!" at a woman, imitating Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. The B side was a parody of the Eartha Kitt record "C'est si bon", broadcast in 1955 on the TV show Sam and Friends. Other songs include "The Yellow Rose of Texas" (1955), where a "Yankee" snare drummer gets out of hand on the recording; "Rock Around Stephen Foster", a parody of recordings by Bill Haley and others in which a music arranger (Freberg) tries with mixed results to get a chorus to perform a medley of Foster's standards in rock and roll style at one point adding Foster's lyrics to Haley's arrangement of "Shake, Rattle and Roll"; "Rock Island Line", based on the 1955 Lonnie Donegan skiffle version, with interruptions by Peter Leeds; and a spoof of The Platters' hit "The Great Pretender" (1956).
He recorded a parody of Elvis Presley's first chart record, "Heartbreak Hotel". In Freberg's version, the echo effect goes out of control, and "Elvis" eventually rips his tight jeans during the performance.
With Foray, he recorded "The Quest for Bridey Hammerschlaugen", a spoof of The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein, a 1956 book on hypnotic regression to a past life, and an LP of the first actual hypnosis session.The Search for Bridey Murphy, Research Recordings No. 101 (1956). LP with excerpts of the actual first hypnosis session. Part 1. Part 2. Accessed November 13, 2022.
"The Great Pretender" and "Banana Boat Song" Freberg used a beatnik musician theme in his 1956 parody of "The Great Pretender", the hit by The Platters—who, like Ray (see above) and Belafonte and Welk (see both below), were not pleased. At that time, when it was still hoped that musical standards might be preserved, it was quite permissible to ridicule the ludicrous, as Freberg had obviously thought when he parodied Presley. The pianist in Freberg's parody, a devotee of Erroll Garner and George Shearing, rebels against playing a single-chord accompaniment, retorting, "I'm not playing that 'clink-clink-clink jazz'!" But Freberg is adamant about the pianist's sticking to The Platters' style: "You play that 'clink-clink-clink jazz', or you won't get paid tonight!" The pianist relents—sort of. The pianist even quotes the first six notes from Shearing's classic piece "Lullaby of Birdland", before returning to the song.The parody was partly parodied when Mitchel Torok recorded "All Over Again, Again" for Columbia Records in mid-March 1959, but billed it as "The Great Pretender", as a spoof on the recent Sun Records recordings of Johnny Cash. Cash had only recently been signed to Columbia. The annoying pianist on the Freberg record was replaced by an equally annoying banjo player and a showboating guitarist on the Columbia release, a song written by Torok's wife who was then billed as "R. Redd" (Ramona Redd). The song concludes with the pianist taking a liking to the arrangement only after he gets into an uncontrollably accelerating groove, despite the histrionic singer's pleas to keep tempo; the singer has to escape the studio.
Freberg's "Banana Boat (Day-O)" (1957) 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, voiced by Leeds, complains, "It's too shrill, man. It's too piercing!" 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!" The flip is "Tele-Vee-Shun", an anti-TV song about what television has done to his family, sung in a heavy faux-Trinidadian accent and set to a Calypso tune. Freberg first recorded the song in 1952, but the 1957 version is the most well known, which lampoons Elvis Presley in one verse: "I turn on Elvis Presley and my daughter scream. / I fear she have a nervous breakdown cos of heem. / I wonder why he wiggle-waggle to de beat. / As a boy he must have had a loose bicycle seat."