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Show Ars Gratia Pecuniae 9 Stan Freberg Ltd. (but not very) r- By Kenneth R. Clark Chicago Tribune He calls his company Stan Freberg Ltd., But Not Very, and his Latin motto is Ars Gratia Pecuniae, which means Art for the sake of money. But the real motive behind Frebergs art, which has been an American classic in advertising, radio, television and records for the last 30 years, always has been puncturing pretensions and reducing icons to a rubble of laughter. His Green Christmas became the most savage satire ever recorded of Madison Avenues commercialization of the season while other records needled early television hits The Lawrence Welk Show and Dragnet, which became St. George and the Dragonet. FROM THE BEGINNING, Freberg hated Madison Avenue, so it was only natural that he should go into advertising, which he did with a vengeance in 1956. He still produces radio and television commercial spots with more bite than a bag full of badgers, but he said apart from his own self-inflat- efforts, the scene really hasn't changed much. I keep waiting for advertising to really improve, he said, and most of the time Im radically disappointed. I said when I first started doing this that 90 percent of what I see is audio-visurubbish spewing out of my television set. Some defensive guy from Madison Avenue said, Are you sure rubbish is the right word? and I said, Perhaps youre right; perhaps garbage is the correct word. I would say things have improved to the point where its only about 87 percent garbage spewing out, but thats not enough improvement for me. I look at advertising on television and I say, God, havent these donkeys learned anything in the last 25 years? Theyre still treating people like they were absolute morons. I saw a commercial the other day where this toilet bowl was talking to the audience and it cut to the audience and the audience was all toilets! Geez. Its tough to deal with an audience full of toilet seats. "I remember some guy for Pepto Bismol a couple of years ago who was traveling in Mexico and he starts telling a group of total strangers about al 28T i The Salt Lake Tribune, Stan Freberg is perhaps the advertising worlds maverick of mavericks. He hates Madison Avenue and regularly horrifies its denizens with outrageous commercial messages which, though the pure product of genius, are super-satiricbarbed needles, heavilylaced with bitter irony. al his diarrhea. If the world were to blow up next week, I certainly hope that somebody would put that commercial, along with the one for Tidy Bowl, into a time capsule so people in the future could see what we really stood for. FREBERG IS SPENDING his creative energies on an ad campaign designed to get a generation of children, kidnaped by television and video games, back in the business of reading comic strips. Hes also making commercials for an old client, the Prince spaghetti company. He is having fun with the sauce and pasta, but he is deadly serious about the 21st Century Comics campaign, for which he was retained by a committee of cartoonists, syndi- cators, distributors, printers and more than 300 daily newspapers. THEY LAUNCHED THEIR national promotion after surveys indicated that while adult readership of the funny papers remains relatively TV Magazine, Sunday, April 28, 1985 f stable, children are deserting in droves. Freberg called the campaign a blow for literacy. The comics are how I learned to read, Freberg said. My mother used to read Prince Valiant and Pop-ey- e and the Katzenjammer Kids to me and I associated reading with the Sunday comics. The main enemy in the literacy crisis we have today has beei. television and the inroads made by video games. The electric children, as S. I. has dubbed them, look at the world entirely differently than people who were reared with other stimuli such as newspapers and books. People who didnt grow through childhood with television think of it as an electronic appliance, like a toaster or a mixmaster, but kids who grew up with television from the beginning will look at a test pattern. "It has some strange tribal mean-Se- e Column 1 Page |
