Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Stan Freberg

Rest in peace.

Stan Freberg, who skewered pop culture and McCarthyism with satirical records and did cartoon voices for nearly six decades, died today of natural causes in Santa Monica. He was 88. His son Donavan confirmed the news to Deadline. ...

Born on August 7, 1926, in Pasadena, Freberg would amass dozens of movie and TV credits including Lady And The Tramp (1955) and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). He also was a regular on the 1958 summer replacement series The Chevy Show and did an arc on Roseanne in 1996. Freberg also did voice work for such series as The Ren & Stimpy Show, Garfield & Friends, The Weird Al Show and narrated the 1985 series Wuzzles. In the early 1960s, he launched a successful career in advertising, winning more than 20 Clio Awards for his TV spots and earning the Los Angeles Area Governors Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2006. ...

Freberg also voiced the central character in the Ward-Kimball-directed-but-never-released It's a Dog's Life. His Capitol record albums are classics, and I used to wear out the record grooves playing a lot of them.

Writer Mark Evanier today noted:

... He was gifted with an amazing imagination and the performing gifts necessary to transfer that imagination into something that others could see and hear. He was a wonderful singer, a superb mimic and a terrific actor. And take note of this: Of all the actors who'd been doing voices for animation in recent years, Stan was the guy who'd been at it the longest. He recorded his first cartoon voice roles in 1945 for release in 1946. As far as I know, his last job was in an episode of The Garfield Show I voice-directed last year. It's currently scheduled to run on Cartoon Network this October, giving Stan a career span of 69 years. ...

An iconic talent has departed.

0 comments:

Site Meter