I'm spending a lot of time working on this Stan Freberg Tribute we're doing on November 2nd. Hey, maybe someone reading this can help me with something…
You may remember Stan did that great commercial with the Lone Ranger for Jeno's Pizza Rolls. Well, of course we're going to be running that at the event and Stan will be telling the incredible tale of getting Clayton Moore to put on his Lone Ranger suit and come over and do it. But that commercial was a parody of another, then-current commercial — for Lark cigarettes. We'd like to show 20 or so seconds of that Lark spot and all we can find are fuzzy online video copies of it that won't look so hot projected up on the huge screen of the Egyptian Theater. Does anyone have a crisp, clear copy they can let us have? My e-mail address is under the Contact Me section to the right.
I am told tickets are selling at a brisker pace than the American Cinematheque imagined and will soon be all gone. This then is a warning to people who know me: Don't write or call me next week and say, "Hey, can you get me tickets?" You have your chance right now to get tickets. Here's the link.
You'll want to be there just to see 1953 footage of Stan, Daws Butler and June Foray doing "St. George and the Dragonet" live on The Toast of the Town, aka The Ed Sullivan Show. And we have some other stuff that even I, a supposed expert on All Things Freberg, had never seen before.
I spent yesterday at the Paley Center for Media comparing their copy of the Zagnut commercial with Stan's copy of the Zagnut commercial and things like that. I keep forgetting what a wonderful repository of wonderment that place is and how helpful and well-informed the staff is. I need to get over there more when I can just watch anything I want…which will probably include more Freberg stuff.
By the way: They have a Jay Ward exhibit on now in the Paley Center in Beverly Hills. They even have on display the old but refurbished Bullwinkle statue that used to stand in front of Mr. Ward's place of business on the Sunset Strip. How they got that thing in there, I have no idea. But then when it comes to most things in this world, I have no idea…