Word: radioed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Omaha! lasts only 6 1/2 minutes, but on radio it must have sounded like forever. A spoof of Oklahoma!-style Broadway musicals, it features an overture, a story and three original, fully orchestrated songs, including one in which a chorus of townsfolk implores the "Omaha moon" not to shine on Council Bluffs. Only in the last minute does the reason for this lavish parody become apparent. Omaha, Neb., it seems, is the hometown of Butter-Nut Coffee. Omaha! is a commercial...
...miniature work of art--and sometimes of daring. Freberg pitched Meadowgold milk in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan, hawked Pittsburgh paints with a takeoff on Moby Dick, and decked out Ann Miller with a Busby Berkeley chorus line to trumpet Heinz's Great American Soups. He produced radio ads for the McGovern-Hatfield amendment to end the Vietnam War and, perhaps even gutsier, persuaded Pacific Airlines to let him do a series of ads poking fun at how people are afraid...
...Baptist minister, Freberg grew up in South Pasadena, Calif., and got into radio right out of high school. After doing cartoon voiceovers and helping create the kids' TV series Time for Beany, Freberg scored his first big success with the 1951 comedy record John & Marsha, in which all the heartache and melodrama of soap operas were distilled into a two-minute dialogue made up of just two words: John and Marsha...
Freberg's parodies continue to gleam even as their subjects fade into history. Arthur Godfrey, the hugely popular star of 1950s radio, was the target of a 1953 Freberg cut, never before released but included in the boxed set. Godfrey may be all but forgotten, but Freberg's gag about his obsequious sidekick, who answers every comment with a knee-jerk, "That's right, Arthur," sums up a century of show-biz sycophancy...
Freberg--who at 73 is living in Los Angeles and still does a syndicated radio show--likes to recall that St. George and the Dragonet, his chart-topping parody of Dragnet, was a big hit in Australia even before the TV show was seen there. Later, when it finally arrived, an Aussie fan came up to Freberg and marveled, "Somebody has gone and built a whole TV show around your record!" For a satirist, that's the Academy Award...