Stan Freberg and Cartoons

Cartoon Research posts about Mr. Freberg's animated commercials:

... Stan [Freberg] was no stranger to animation, having appeared in an unwholesome number of cartoons from Warner Brothers, Screen Gems, and UPA. He had great comic delivery, and could play a wide range of character types. At times it was hard to tell that he actually wasn’t all those different people. ...

Stan's old now, and if you're younger than a certain age, he's a dim and distant figure in America's popular culture. But if you're a Boomer or even older, memories of him shine bright.

Mr. Freberg worked with Bob Clampett on the original Cecil and Beany. (The show was a cartoon in the early sixties, but a T.V. puppet show in the late forties, which was the project Stan worked on.) And Stan had a variety show on network radio when that species was in the last-gasp throes of extinction. (The year was 1957.)

But Stan Freberg's crowning glory, in my opinion, was this gem:



"The United States of America, Vol. I," came out the summer of 1961 as a record album. It was a Broadway musical on vinyl, and I listened to it until the grooves wore out. The record was expensive to produce (as evidenced by the fragment directly above) and apparently didn't sell enough copies to trigger a Volume 2 (at least until way later.)

Sadly, not all of Stan Freberg's work made it into the public square. He and Ward Kimball collaborated on a feturette in the early seventies, but the cartoon was never completed.

Happily, lots of Mr. Freberg's completed work is out on the internet and elsewhere, waiting for the uninitiated to discover it.