Stan Freberg changed my life

28 thoughts on “Stan Freberg changed my life”

1. My first comment, while Jay was in the other room and I was watching the commercial, “I hate watching this commercial, it’s uncanny.” (Gentle readers, I know he’s not much like that NOW, but I knew him when he was only 24.)

   My second comment, “Wait, THAT was how you met (name redacted)?!?!??!?!?!” (I have little love for (name redacted).)Report

   1. My responses:

      1) *grunt*

      2) “Wait, THAT was how you met that chick who (expletive deleted) you up?”Report

      1. It’s weird, because usually relationships based on one person looking like a famous person go so much better than that.Report

2. I didn’t even know Stan was still around. He was a brilliant and funny man, the father of a lot of great comedy, a champion of jazz and radio long into the era of rock and TV. Here’s his classic “What radio can do that TV can’t” bit.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPbvFv6BJvUReport

   1. But you could do that on television today.Report

3. You’ve been stirring a lot of weird commercial memories up lately. This is another one.

   Along similar lines, my future wife and I were walking through a department store in college when we were hit with the overwhelming smell of the perfume section and I did this. Loudly. It was around 15 years after Labyrinth was released, so I figured it would just confuse and embarrass her, but that’s how I roll. Instead, she recognized it immediately and almost died laughing / of embarrassment. This was a turning point in my life.Report

4. I can’t really speak to memories of Stan but I spent a lot of time with our encyclopedia set. My summer routine in the 80s consisted of rising early, baseball practice in the backyard and then some kind of other mischief, then retresting indoors to escape our KY humidity. I would spendthe day reading comic books and encyclopedias. I would pick a topic, always something historical, and then dive in. It helped shape my love of history into something resembling an academic pursuit.

   I still used those books for a while in college even before that whole Internet thing.Report

   1. #same

      If I had had Wikipedia back then, well, I don’t think I’d ever have left the house. By now I’d have merged with the machine.Report

      1. @veronica-d

         +100

         I shudder to think of the man-hours I spend in Wikipedia now. It is the ultimate rabbit-hole for random trivia. The TV show Wikis are even worse. Having never read the JRR Martin books or the Walking Dead comic books I have still completely spoiled everything I watched by diving into those Wikis.Report

5. http://www.theonion.com/articles/remember-me-im-that-kid-who-had-a-report-due-on-sp,10854/

   His son was also the voice of Linus and Charlie Brown in the late 70s and early 80s according to wikipedia.Report

6. Man, I was actually rather enormously amused by that commercial. I didn’t realize the 80’s had that kind of dry wit. Then again, since I was in single digits during that era I really didn’t know much about the 80’s at all.Report

   1. Dry wit is retro. That’s why hipsters use it ironically.Report

7. Ah, the classic two-tone jeans jacket. Sweet.

   I won a set of Encyclopedia Britannica in a spelling bee as a kid. As I already had a (very old, and inferior to Britannica – but good enough, and hey, who would’ve thought that HISTORY and SCIENCE and GEOGRAPHY would ever change on us?!) set of encyclopedias, I sold the Britannicas for a few hundred in the classifieds and bought a stereo (dual cassette decks! High-speed dubbing!) and custom-made skimboard with the proceeds.

   I think I made the right choice.Report

   1. We had the Encyclopedia Americana.

      You traitor.Report

      1. I said I sold it!

         I forget what the older set I already had was. It came from my grandma’s house, probably published in the 40s or maybe early 50s I am guessing? So it was full of all kinds of already-outdated info.Report

   2. “Ah, the classic two-tone jeans jacket. Sweet.”

      Did anyone have the classic Levi’s jean jacket? Two things that were very popular in grade school:

      – Put a .22LR cartridge in the Levis tag on the pocket. It fit perfectly and looked SO cool. Then your mom would run your jacket through the washer and you would panic that it would go off in the dryer and kill her.

      – Buy one of those big bandannas for your favorite band and have your mom sew it onto the back panel. Then you can advertise Metallica, ACDC or Def Leppard every day.Report

      1. I think I finally got a genuine Levi’s (single-tone) later, but my first one would have been some sort of off-brand two-tone job like pictured.Report

      2. The single-tone was the only one I had but man, I loved that jacket. that was a prized possession for a couple of years.Report

      3. I too wore a Levi’s Trucker jacket. Loved that thing. I got it in junior high, and by the time I was in high school it had broken in so perfectly, faded in just the right spots.Report

8. Wow. Was 1988 really that tacky? I mean, I was there, but the memories — they have been mercifully washed away by time.

   I am sooooo glad I cannot remember any commercial that remind me of myself.

   DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.Report

   1. 1988 was pretty bad in hindsight but I still remember the fashions more fondly than the 90s. I also think a lot about how much longer it took style to reach me in the Midwest without the internet and 24-hour news cycle. Now, fashion in most of the country seems to be mostly homogeneous (with a few exceptions for places like NY or Los Angeles).Report

   2. Tacky? TACKY? TACKY?!?Report

      1. Yeah, you need a hearing aid, grandpa?Report

      2. No, but I’m afraid you’re going to tell me.

         To get one.Report

      3. Tee hee.

         Actually I don’t really mean the clothes so much. Just, everything. The crappy old 8-bit computer. Which, the Mac existed. Both the Amiga and the Atari ST came out in ’85. Was everyone still using crappy Apple II’s? Wasn’t that passe by then?

         I don’t even want to know what CDs those are. (A bet a lot of Rush.)Report

9. Here’s my favorite bit of Stan Freberg trivia:

   It was Freberg — not Mel Blanc — who did the voice of Pete Puma in the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

   (“Better give me a whoooole lotta lumps.”)

   Report

   1. http://th06.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2013/192/5/3/pete_puma_by_roperseid-d6cyf4p.jpgReport

10. Freberg used to host a “Radio show classics” program that ran on a news radio station in Colosse. I used to listen to it religiously, as I was a fan of that. By “host” he would just introduce the program (The Shadow or Life of Riley or The Whistler or whatever) and talk just a bit about it. But his name always brings back warm memories because of that.Report

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