Word: freberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Union Station; he was taken on a tour of Boys Town, paid his respects to the archbishop, visited a convent for errant girls, and was named Chief Charging Buffalo by the Omaha Indians. The excuse for all the excitement seemed as zany as the celebration itself: Stan Freberg, visiting comic-turned-adman from California, had come to town to lead the Omaha Symphony Orchestra through a 6½-minute singing commercial of his own composition...
Called Omaha! ("shortest musical comedy and longest radio commercial ever produced"), it liltingly celebrates the joys of Omaha and only incidentally those of Butter-nut Coffee, which is packed there. After the orchestra swung through Freberg's lighthearted, tuneful spoof of Oklahoma!-type musicals, even skeptics who had come to hoot remained to hum. The mayor is recommending the adoption of the rollicking Whatta They Got in Omaha? as the civic anthem, Capitol Records has put out a recording with I Look in Your Face and I See Omaha on the flip side. More important, from Freberg...
Simple Notion. The son of a retired Baptist minister, Stan Freberg began to learn the tricks of beguiling an audience when he was only eleven. His uncle was Conray the Magician, and young Stan served as "coat stuffer" for that old vaudevillian. By 1955 Freberg was well established as a minor comic in TV and a far-out satirist on records. His liveliest: a drama of passion whose only dialogue consisted of the words "John" and "Marsha"; St. George and the Dragonet, a take-off on Jack Webb's Dragnet, which sold 1,000,000 records in three weeks...
...commercials and the kidding can be wrapped up together? The soft-selling, satirical commercial had been tried before, and except for a few engaging specimens such as Bert and Harry Piel of Piel's Beer, had fallen into limbo. Stan was undeterred. Incorporating himself in Los Angeles as Freberg, Ltd. ("but not very"), he took a Latin motto ("Ars gratia pecuniae"-Art for money's sake) and put his talents on the market ("bizarre sales ideas, at a bizarre fee; but worth...
Scope for Scope. Freberg, 31, is a very funny fellow who is clearly torn between his need for an audience and his desire to speak his mind. His orneriness was planed down over the past year when he and Producer-Writer Pete Barnum wrote and rewrote a long succession of TV shows for NBC. All were rejected because they lacked "scope." When the sardonic pair then submitted a new effort entitled Scope, NBC wished them a cold farewell...