Len Dresslar, 80, Voiced Jolly Green Giant

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

In 1959, Chicago singer Len Dresslar stepped into a Windy City recording studio and, in his deep baritone, sang three words for a commercial jingle that have echoed through the decades: “Ho, ho, ho.”


Dresslar, who died of cancer October 16 in the hospice of a Palm Springs, Calif., hospital at 80, was the familiar, booming voice of the Jolly Green Giant.


The leaf-clad Jolly Green Giant has been acknowledged by Advertising Age magazine as one of the three most recognizable American advertising icons of the 20th century – after Tony the Tiger and the Marlboro Man.


Dresslar’s melodic rendition of his famous jingle line comes in the middle of “From the valley of the jolly – ho, ho, ho – Green Giant.”


“I’m the king of the minimalists,” Dresslar told the Detroit Free Press in 1999. “I do ‘Ho, ho, ho’ – that’s it.”


He periodically re-recorded the “ho, ho, ho” for Green Giant commercials, most recently in 1999 when, after an eight-year hiatus, the Jolly Green Giant was reintroduced in regional TV spots.


Jamie King of Leo Burnett, Green Giant’s longtime Chicago advertising company, said at the time that Dresslar “really embodies the voice and the tone and the energy we want in the Giant.”


For Dresslar, “It was a little choice plum that just dropped in my lap.”


“I found myself without a job,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000. “I got a call one day, ‘Come into the studio.’ We were singing, ‘From the valley of the jolly …’ when the producer said, ‘Can you say ho, ho, ho?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ He said, ‘That’s the voice we want.'”


Dresslar often joked that, thanks to residuals, his “ho, ho, ho” put his two daughters through college.


“Yes, well it certainly did – that and many other commercials,” Nicki, his wife of 58 years, told Los Angeles Times yesterday.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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