I bought my parents a CD collection of Stan Freberg‘s radio show for Christmas this year, and they loved it. I knew they would because many a year ago, I came across an old double album of his comedy in my grandmother’s house which my dad had gotten back when the earth was new.
Anyway, Stan Freberg is a brilliant comedian, and his show was a perfect use of the medium. Insane stereo tests, faux commercials taking the place of sponsors he couldn’t get, satires of everything from history to popular TV shows to network censorship to politics.
Thanks to the marvels of the modern era, you too can listen to his short lived and much mourned radio show: The Stan Freberg Show. If that just whets your appetite for the good ol’ days of pre-visualization, you can browse 11,985 other radio shows in the Old Time Radio library.
Thanks!
Wotcha. I know you’ll love it.
Freberg is an all time favorite and references a lot of the great radio comedy in the years just after the golden era of radio (the 20’s – 1959). I get my daily does of Old Time Radio from OTRCAT.com – they have a ‘daily’ which is a broadcast of the same day in years past – quite an interesting ‘blast from the past’.
B.W.
I was surprised when I first discovered how recently The Stan Freberg Show was on the air. As you say, it’s such a strong exponent of the radio comedy tradition, I expected it to come from the apex period instead of the decline.
Thank you for the OTRCAT.com tip. I’ll be sure to check it out. :thanks:
Was looking at this blog that I just ran across. REading some of the older articles, and came across this.
I clicked the link to the old-time radio broadcast (I’m 28 years old, and was curious what radio was REALLY like back then.)
Found Abbot and Costello episodes. out of 44 tracks, they don’t have the famous “Who’s on First?” 😥
They definitely performed it on that radio show. It looks like OTR just has a 44 episodes online, but A &C did hundreds. You have my deepest condolences. Were the other shows worth listening to, at least?
hehe, well, to tell you the truth, I never tried listening to any other program before I posted that last comment. I went back and clicked a random link to listen to a random broadcast (forget which one,) but it requires that you d/l a .ram file. None of my media players will recognize the file type.
I originally assumed the site was a streaming library. So I never listened to anything from that site yet 🙁
They’re Real Media files. If you don’t want to install Real Player (which I didn’t), you can play them with Real Alternative.
yeahm I don’t care for real media layer. I’ll try real alternative.
Thank you! :yes:
The foaming comedian is terrific. Crossing the Delaware on Donald Duck, and the Zazaloff family radio gymnastic highwire act are fond memories. My parents thought it was a good idea to get my brother and i to sleep by playing comedy softly in the room. I now have the entire Freberg collection and Bill Cosby collection memorized, and can quote verbatim.