Stan Freberg and Mr Jinks

Let's go back to your childhood...childhood...childhood...

I recently needed an HDMI cable and just knew I had one "somewhere" amongst all my "stuff". That meant a lot of rummaging about in the various storage boxes in my studio.

As it happens, I didn't find that cable I knew I had, but I did stumble across some old hard drives and spent a happy hour or three discovering some music I'd forgotten all about.

One particular gem that emerged was a rather splendid four disc set of Stan Freberg recordings. Now, I'd known of him ever since the late 1950s when I first heard the "Banana Boat Song" on the radio, but most of the material was unfamiliar to me. 

Stan the Man

Freberg was a remarkable character, as a quick Google will confirm, and the more I read about him and the more I got into his recordings, the more intrigued I became. His 70 year career spanned puppetry, writing (for MAD magazine on a couple of occasions), acting, voice acting, radio, recording and TV. He was also involved in the advertising business, which provided plenty of targets for his acerbic satire. He made many TV and radio commercials for everything from prunes to lawnmowers, and he was responsible for a Heinz Soup advert which was the most expensive TV ad ever made at the time (1970).

"Let's face the chicken gumbo and dance!"

As I delved deeper, I discovered that one of his frequent collaborators was Daws Butler - a cartoon voice artist (as was Freberg in one of his many guises) whose name rang a distinct bell, and then came a blinding revelation - he was the voice of MR JINKS!

As a pre-teen, my favourite TV programme was "The Huckleberry Hound Show" and "Pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinks" was my favourite segment. Above all, I loved Mr Jinks.

Cartoon gold

Mr Jinks was a calculating but not especially intelligent cat who hated those "meeces to pieces" and he spoke in this sort of hipster drawl while dropping all sorts of clangers with 'difficult' words - "ectoplastic" instead of "ectoplasm", for example. 

What really was the icing on the cake for me, after discovering the Freberg album, was finding every single one of the original Hanna & Barbera  "Pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinks" cartoons here. So, there I was, a 71 year old bloke, devouring every single one of the fifty-seven (57) available and, you know what, they're just as funny as they were when I was 7 or 8. In fact, they're probably funnier, as some of the humour is quite subtle - especially when it's coming from Mr Jinks - and I missed it when I was a kid. 

...but back to Stan Freberg...

Several of the Freberg recordings have a performer being hassled by his producer, played by Freberg. There's more than a touch of the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch about this, and several other tracks with Freberg and a hapless performer (often played by Peter Leeds) trying to record a track in the studio. I can't help but think that Butler got a lot of his Mr Jinks voice from Leeds - just listen to Freberg's luckless "Rock Island Line" singer. It's almost Mr Jinks.

"Never mind the sheep..."

Although Freberg made a lot of novelty recordings, there are more serious satirical items in his back catalogue - in particular, "Stan Freberg Presents The United States Of America, Vol. 1: The Early Years". Produced in 1961, this was once described as "the Sgt Pepper of comedy albums" - being the first comedy concept album - and lampoons McCarthyism, consumerism, commercialisation and chauvinism. amongst other national foibles. It's worn surprisingly well. 

Freberg never stopped working, and he carried on right up until he died in 2015 at the grand old age of 88 - a giant of US humour and still funny today.

 

To qualify for some Freberg goodies, just answer the simple question that's going to appear below - as soon as I find that pesky HDMI cable...