Well, dear readers, I am sitting here like so much fish, listening to the original mono version of The Age of Anxiety with Bernstein conducting and Lukas Foss at the piano. It’s very good, but Foss has none of the subtlety of Philippe Entremont. Still, it’s essential. And in honor of this recording, today’s notes shall be in mono, all words coming from the center – no words hard-panned to the right or left for those wide stereophonic notes. Okay, I did watch quite a few things yesterday, so let’s get to it, shall we? We shall and right now. I watched a motion picture entitled Men, starring Jessie Buckley and Rory Calhoun – sorry – Rory Kinnear, son of the wonderful actor Roy Kinnear, and written and directed by Alex Garland. It is a load of pretentious twaddle from start to finish, which is why it probably appealed to its leading lady, an actress I really don’t care for at all. She’s fine in this and so is Rory Calhoun – sorry – Rory Kinnear, who plays all the men but one. The one he doesn’t play, Jessie Buckley’s character’s husband, who she’s about to divorce. I will never understand casting an actor who cannot be understood – in this case a combo platter of a strong accent and mushy marbles in mouth enunciation. I literally could not understand a single word he said. I suppose you’d call this an arty folk horror film – yes, there’s now a sub-genre of horror films called folk horror. You can keep that sub-genre far from me. There’s some extremely gross Cronenberg-type imagery towards the end – this director obviously likes Cronenberg and Kubrick, but he is not them. He certainly can make a movie, but after having sat through two or three of them, you know exactly what you’re going to get. I’m sure there are people who LOVE this sort of thing – a few critics thought it okay, but more didn’t, and it made exactly no money. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the really interesting stuff. I happened to come across a channel that had some very rare unaired pilots and other things – as it turns out, the channel belongs to Jeff Joseph, someone I’ve known for years and used to buy film prints from – his company is called Sabucat. Let’s start with the most interesting of all I saw, a one-hour 1962 TV special called The Chun King Chow Mein Hour that was so far ahead of its time that its time probably never even arrived. It was written by and starred Stan Freberg.
Now, you must know that I was already a huge Freberg FANatic from his Capitol recordings, especially my 45rpm record of St. George and the Dragonet, a spoof of Dragnet, which I was obsessed with and played over and over and over again. I also loved its flip side, Little Blue Riding Hood, another Dragnet spoof. Amazingly, St. George and the Dragonet reached number one on the Billboard chart, selling over a million records. Even before those, we had a 78rpm record of his comedy sketch, John and Marsha. After the 45, he did other satires – another 45 had a spoof of Sh-Boom on one side and C’est si Bon on the other. I got everything he put out. Then came Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America, Volume 1. I thought it was brilliant and Freberg’s music and lyrics were terrific and I’ve always found it a shame he didn’t ever write a musical for Broadway. But he found his greatest success in advertising – commercials to be exact, creating many of the most iconic TV commercials ever.
I’d never even heard of The Chun King Chow Mein Hour, so I was delighted to see it, not knowing what to expect. Whatever you expect, you would never expect what you get, which is a satire on TV and advertising. I laughed out loud many times, despite the dated aspects of humor – of course, if you aired this today, people’s heads would explode. I think this show was designed to make Freberg a TV star – but the show is far too outré to have ever been a mainstream hit. Freberg got Saul Bass to design the look of the show, there are no opening credits and the closing credits are read by Freberg, which is VERY clever. There are several fun musical numbers written by Freberg – I do believe I spied dancer Bobby Banas and if my eyes didn’t deceive me, a very young Lee Roy Reams. Others in the show include such greats as June Foray, Howard McNear, Patty Regan, Mike Mazurki, and a very young Arte Johnson. Oh, and an unbilled cameo by some guy named Frank Sinatra. It is must-see TV and I’m putting the link to it right here.
https://youtu.be/UUiJztrz3_g?si=UvyqzoY5xUlKB7WW
Also, unaired pilots for a Gary Lockwood sitcom whose only problem was that Gary Lockwood is about as funny as a door knob, a TV version of The Mouse that Roared with Sid Caesar in the Peter Sellers roles, an absolutely appallingly bad pilot for a Mel Torme comedy show with music called Everything Happens to Mel, a 1978 terrible pilot called Almost Heaven, starring Robert Hays, Eva Gabor, and Jay Leno, a pilot for The Secret Life of James Thurber starring Orson Bean, and, best of all, a pilot for The Nancy Dussault Show, with Nancy playing an aspiring Broadway performer. That show was created by Carl Reiner and directed by Dick Van Dyke and also starred Lawrence Pressman and Karen Morrow. You’ll want to subscribe to his channel because there’s tons more stuff on it.
I did get nine-and-a-half hours of sleep, I answered e-mails, I went to the mail place and picked up some Pepcid, then to Gelson’s, where I got some of their excellent creamy tomato soup and a half rack of ribs, which the Studio City branch does really well. I came home and ate all of that – very good. Then I began my viewing, and here we are.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I’ll rest my voice, shave and shower, and then at four-thirty we do our stumble-through. After, I’ll give whatever notes I have, and we’ll run anything that was rough. Then I’ll eat and then watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow I will do nothing but rest my voice and relax and eat. Wednesday, I’ll relax and rest my voice, then we have sound check at five and show at eight-thirty and hopefully check and food afterwards.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, rest my voice, shave and shower, do a stumble-through, run whatever we need to, eat, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: Who are your favorite satirists like Mr. Freberg, and what are your favorite works of theirs? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have made this amazing Stan Freberg discovery.