For a budget release, this 21-track compilation provides a splendid overview of Stan Freberg's Capitol Records output from the 1950s. The label was essentially issuing studio re-recordings of sketches and songs first broadcast on Freberg's criminally short-lived weekly radio series on CBS. While other discs have been issued covering the same era, few (if any) contain as much or span the wide array of material. Freberg's show ran during July and August of 1957 and included the host and an all-star cast with noted voice-over ...
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For a budget release, this 21-track compilation provides a splendid overview of Stan Freberg's Capitol Records output from the 1950s. The label was essentially issuing studio re-recordings of sketches and songs first broadcast on Freberg's criminally short-lived weekly radio series on CBS. While other discs have been issued covering the same era, few (if any) contain as much or span the wide array of material. Freberg's show ran during July and August of 1957 and included the host and an all-star cast with noted voice-over talents June Foray, Peter Leeds, Hans Conried, and Daws Butler. All that, plus musical arrangements from the pen of the one and only Billy May. Speaking of which, Freberg's spoofs sold just as well as the artists he was so cagily sending up. With no attention paid to genre, he would rip apart Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," Eartha Kitt's "C'est Si Bon," or Mitch Miller and his Gang's "Yellow Rose of Texas," with equal vigor. In fact, he goes even further, lampooning mind-numbing soap operas ("John & Marsha") and crime dramas. Nowhere is his satirical sting more pointed than on Freberg's deadpan take of Jack Webb on "St. George and the Dragonet," the full-length two-part "Christmas Dragnet" and "Little Blue Riding Hood." While most of the aforementioned titles are offered on other Freberg anthologies, Master Satirist (2007) is worth owning if for no other reason than having the harder-to-locate works, "The Lone Psychiatrist," the Jackie Gleason spoof on "The Honey Earthers," or Edward R. Murrow's "Person to Person" program. ~ Lindsay Planer, Rovi
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