Any self-respecting fan of classic cartoons should be more than familiar with the name Mel Blanc. Mr. Blanc is widely regarded as perhaps the most prolific and influential voice-actor of the twentieth century. His immense talents have given life to hundreds of the most beloved cartoon characters ever created! He was the versatile voice behind nearly all of the Looney Tunes characters, including: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester The Cat, and Speedy Gonzales...and as incredible as it sounds, that doesn't even scratch the surface! In an interview given shortly before his death, he estimated that he had performed more than four hundred voices in over three thousand cartoons!
Mel Blanc was born in San Fransisco, California, on May 30, 1908, to Jewish-American parents. His full given name was Melvin Jerome Blank. The change in the spelling of his last name came about when, at the age of sixteen, a teacher humiliated him by saying that he would amount to nothing, and end up being just like his name, a blank. After that experience, he had the spelling of his name legally changed to Blanc, and he continued to use the altered spelling for the remainder of his life.
The newly christened Mr. Blanc began his career as a voice-actor in 1927, at the age of nineteen. His first program, The Hoot Owls, broadcast on the KGW station, earned him much praise for his flawless ability to provide completely different and distinct voices for multiple characters. In 1933, he moved on to the KEX station to produce and host his own show, Cobwebs And Nuts. The show debuted in June of that year, airing six days a week for two years.
Then in 1935, Mel took a job at the KFWB station in Hollywood, which was owned by Warner Brothers. He briefly joined the cast of The Johnny Murray Show, before moving over to CBS radio a year later, where he worked on The Joe Penner Show. He appeared on virtually every popular radio program throughout the 1930s and 1940s, including The Abbott And Costello Show, and The Great Gildersleeve, just to name a few. He was so successful, that he was briefly given his own show on CBS radio, The Mel Blanc Show; it ran from the fall of 1946, to the early summer of 1947. He was even featured as a regular on the The Jack Benny Program playing various roles, including: Benny's Maxwell automobile, a violin teacher named Professor Le Blanc, Polly The Parrot, and Benny's pet polar bear, Carmichael. In addition to these, he also voiced numerous other minor characters.
But it was the character of Sy The Little Mexican that was perhaps Blanc's most popular and memorable performance. Thanks to the perfect comic timing of both Blanc and Benny, his famous “Si Sy Sew Sue” routine was guaranteed to elicit audience laughter no matter how many times it was performed. In fact, Mel's absolute dead-pan delivery of the routine was so perfectly hysterical that Benny himself often struggled to keep a straight face. Years later, Benny's daughter, Joan, recalled that Mel was one of her father's best friends, because he claimed that no one else on the show could make him laugh like Mel could.
Benny's writers really challenged his abilities. They went out of their way to give him the toughest assignments that they could dream up. They would often ask him to perform seemingly impossible characterizations, such as an “English horse whinny,” or a goldfish. No matter what they threw at him, though, Mel always amazed them. He rose to every challenge admirably!
The work for which he was most known began in 1936, when he joined Leon Schlesinger Productions. The company made the animated cartoons which were distributed by Warner Brothers. The way he tells it, he first auditioned for a man named Norman Spencer, who served as musical director, and was put in charge of cartoon voices as well. Spencer turned him down flat, saying that they had all the voices they needed. Spencer died not long after, and the company sound man, Treg Brown, took charge of hiring voice talent. Mel auditioned again, and Brown was so impressed that he introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin. All of them loved his voice characterizations. Thus began a reign of nearly six decades as the king of cartoon voices!
The first picture to feature Mel's voice work was Picador Porky, in which he portrayed a drunken bull. Then, in his next picture, Porky's Duck Hunt, he took over the voice of Porky Pig. This picture also featured the debut of Daffy Duck. From that point, his repertoire quickly expanded to include Bugs Bunny, (who developed from an earlier character known as Happy Rabbit), and all of the other now-familiar Warner characters.
Interestingly, Blanc's now iconic carrot-chomping Bunny presented him with a unique challenge. In order to achieve Bugs' trademark carrot munching sound, Blanc had to munch real carrots on the recordings. This created a problem, because taking the time to swallow them slowed him down considerably in the delivery of the dialogue. To solve this, he began keeping a spittoon next to his microphone in the studio; he would then munch the carrots as needed, and spit them out. At the time, it was alleged that he did this because he was allergic to carrots, but several sources later confirmed that this rumor was untrue. Blanc himself once stated that the carrot munching was the least of his challenges. In his own estimation, he thought that the character of Yosemite Sam was much more difficult to perform properly. He claimed that it was very rough on his throat because the voice was very raspy and usually required him to speak at top volume.
Besides all of these characters, Mel also performed the voice of Woody Woodpecker for a brief time, but since those cartoons were produced by a rival company, Mel was forced to bow out when Warner Brothers placed him under exclusive contract. That voice was then taken over by producer Walter Lantz's wife. However, it is a little known fact that Mel was actually the one who developed that character's now famous laugh.
Throughout his career, Blanc was fiercely protective of the characters that he created. He protected the rights to them with his very life, and would not hesitate to take legal action if they were ever violated. By the early 40s, he began to demand more recognition for his contributions, and his persistence paid off. In 1944, he became the first voice-actor to receive on-screen credit for his work. A stipulation was written into his contract which stated that his on-screen credit was to read: “Voice characterization by Mel Blanc.”
His career at Warner continued through the 1950s. During this time, he frequently recycled gags that he had first popularized on The Jack Benny Program. In fact, he was joined by the Benny cast in 1959, all of whom performed their original characters for a cartoon called The Mouse That Jack Built, in which they were all drawn as mice.
Shortly after this, Mel was involved in a nearly fatal car accident, in which he suffered a triple fracture of the skull, as well as fractures in both legs, and the pelvis. The skull fracture put him in a coma for three weeks. Get well cards from concerned fans poured in by the thousands, most of them addressed to Bugs Bunny. Years later in his autobiography, he credited Bugs with saving his life, saying that when all other attempts to coax him out of his comatose state had failed, a clever doctor began talking to him as if he were Bugs. Although he had no personal recollection of this, his wife and son told him that the doctor would ask him every day: “How are you today, Bugs Bunny? And Mel would answer him in Bugs' voice. Slowly, he made his way back to consciousness, and returned home from the hospital in March of 1961, where he was greeted with the triumphant cheers of more than 150 friends and neighbors. During his recovery, his son Noel stood in for him at work, voicing many of his most popular characters!
At the time of the accident, Mel was also portraying the character of Barney Rubble on The Flintstones, where actor Daws Butler filled in for him during his absence. Although not fully recovered he continued with the show as soon as he was mentally alert enough to voice the character once more. The producers of the show set up recording equipment in his home in order to allow him to work from his residence. Most of the work was then recorded while Blanc lay in bed in a full body cast, with the other actors gathered around him.
By the time he had sufficiently recovered, his contract at Warner Brothers had expired, so he moved on to the Hanna-Barbera company, where he contributed mightily to their roster of characters. In addition to Barney Rubble, he also provided the voice of George Jetson's penny-pinching boss, Cosmo Spacely, Lippy The Lion's lovable hyena sidekick Hardy Har Har, as well as the coyote, Deputy Droop-A-Long in the Ricochet Rabbit cartoons.
By the mid-to-late 1960s, Warner Brothers had been contracted to make a new series of cartoons for theatrical release. Of course they called upon Mel to reprise many of his characters, most notably Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales. He also continued to voice these characters in commercial advertisements for numerous products. And as if that weren't enough, he also had several lesser known voices up his sleeve. He was the first voice of Toucan Sam in the Kellogg's Froot Loops commercials, and although he was not the only actor to do this, he also performed in several episodes of The Munsters, playing the black raven who lived inside their Koo Koo clock.
All of these voices were continually performed, and he added more and more to his trick bag as the years went on. By the 1980s, he was voicing yet another distinctive character, that of Twiki in Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. He did that for two seasons, before taking on what would become his final character, Heathcliff, in the mid-eighties. By then, declining health had forced him to become less active. Sadly, Mr. Blanc passed away due to heart disease and emphysema in 1989, at the age of 81. At his own request, his tombstone was inscribed with the words “Th-th-that's all, folks!”
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