America is celebrating its Semiquincentennial! It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Let’s just say “250th anniversary”.
Since early this year, KCOW (that lovable, humble, radiant radio station) has been doing prize giveaways to celebrate this shindig. And in my job as Production Director I made a batch of promotional announcements about the contests. Instead of just plain old straight promos I decided to make some funny (one hopes) messages. Writing and producing funny commercials, you see, is one is my favorite things.
I did five of these, with each one portraying an interview (via radio’s well known ability for time travel) with notable figures in American history.
The trickiest part of this project was to avoid ripping off Stan Freberg’s “United States of America”. Freberg is the absolute best at this kind of comedy:
Of course, Stan had a full orchestra and about 5 times as many actors as we do. But we had the magnificent Kalin Krohe and the fantabulous Tammy Griffee. What more does one need?
Anyway, like I said, we did 5 of these for the beginning of the year and now I am world premiering the second batch of messages. Each of these spots contain actual, genuine American history–researched and everything! Of course, I also threw in a lot of incongruous stuff in there. Another lesson from Freberg.
Anyway, you wanna hear these things? Sure you do!
Thanks to Kalin and Tammy for going along with my nonsense!