Here's an early "mark your calendar" notice for those of you in the Southern California area…
As is well known by anyone I'd ever want to associate with, Stan Freberg is one of America's great wits and satirists, and he has also been one of our great cartoon voice actors for close to sixty (60!) years. His achievements in this last area will be celebrated and examined at an A.S.I.F.A. event on April 24th. (A.S.I.F.A. is the Association Internationale du Film D'Animation — in plain English, the International Animation Society. Click here to exit stage left to their website.)
What we're going to do — that's right; I'm the host of this thing — is to show a number of old cartoons for which Stan did voice work. Some will be well-known classics like The Three Little Bops (above) but most will be obscure stuff which Stan may not remember well…or, in a few cases, never even saw in finished form. Then I will relentlessly grill him and maybe we'll try whips and chains or sodium pentathol. One way or another, we'll get him to remember something about the work and tell us. The film program, which is being assembled by the inestimable Jerry Beck of Cartoon Research, will be chosen more for history than entertainment — Jerry promises at least one stinkeroo — but it should be fun, nonetheless.
That's Wednesday evening, April 24. Check here or at the A.S.I.F.A. site for further details, including the location, which has yet to be firmed up. But it'll be open to the public and you'll get to meet Stan and see a lot of weird cartoons he did and get to hear what, if anything, he remembers about them. And if we're nice, maybe he'll do a little Pete Puma for us.