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Melvin Jerome "Mel" Blanc (30 May 1908 – 10 July 1989) was an American voice actor, comedian, radio personality, and recording artist. Although he began his over-sixty-year career performing in radio, he is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros. as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical short films, during the Golden Age of Animation.

Biography[]

Blanc was born in San Francisco to Russian-Jewish parents in 1908. As a kid, he grew up in Portland, Oregon. While growing up, he had a thing for voices and dialect, which he started to voice at the age of ten. At sixteen, he claimed that he changed the spelling of his name from "Blank" to "Blanc", because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". Blanc joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame.[1]

Blanc had some musical knowledge. After graduating from high school in 1927, he split his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of nineteen, and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon, and northern California.[2]

His voice acting career with Warner Bros. began in 1937 with the cartoon short "Picador Porky", in which he voiced two hobos who disguise themselves as a drunken bull. By 1944, Blanc had become the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit for his work, beginning with the Bugs Bunny short "Little Red Riding Rabbit".[3] According to Blanc's autobiography, he was given this exclusivity by Leon Schlesinger in exchange for not getting a raise.[2] The compromise enabled Blanc become a favorite voice actor to cast for other productions, even though it meant his fellow players in the company like June Foray would work in relative obscurity for years more.

Having earned the nickname "The Man of 1,000 Voices," Blanc is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice-acting industry. Over the span of his career, he was in over five thousand cartoons and did over four hundred different voices for them.[4]

Blanc began smoking cigarettes at the age of nine. He continued his pack-a-day habit until age 77, after he was diagnosed with emphysema.[5] On May 19, 1989, his family checked him into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles when they noticed he had a bad cough while shooting a commercial. He was originally expected to recover,[6] but when his health worsened, doctors discovered he had advanced coronary artery disease. After nearly two months in the hospital, Blanc died on July 10, 1989 at Cedars-Sinai of complications from both illnesses. He was 81. He is interred at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in section 13, Pinewood section, plot #149 in Hollywood.[7][8] His will specified that his gravestone read "THAT'S ALL FOLKS"—the phrase with which Blanc's character, Porky Pig, concluded many Warner Bros. cartoons.

Looney Roles[]

See Also[]

Other Voice Work[]

In addition to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Blanc had done voice work for cartoon studios including Disney, Screen Gems, MGM, and Universal before he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros in 1941. For Disney, Blanc had recorded dialogue for Gideon the Cat, Honest John's sidekick, from Pinocchio, but went unused after the studio decided to make him mute similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the only material that remains of him includes three hiccups that he had recorded. At the MGM cartoon studio, Blanc had done voice work for cartoons that were directed by Looney Tunes co-creator Hugh Harman where he would often play leading parts such as the squirrel grandfather in the Oscar nominated short "Peace on Earth" and the titular character in "Tom Turkey and His Harmonica Humdingers", along with voicing John Silver in the ill-fated The Captain and the Kids film series and Count Screwloose in two cartoons that were directed by cartoonist Milt Gross. He also did voice work for the Screen Gems cartoon studio including the first Fox and the Crow cartoon, Frank Tashlin's "The Fox and the Grapes", which Chuck Jones cited as the inspiration for the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.[9] Blanc was also the original voice of Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz Productions, but only voiced the character in his first few theatrical shorts. However, he did reprise his role in recordings for Capitol Records from 1948 until 1955.

Mel Blanc originally voiced Elmer Fudd between 1937 and 1938, while Elmer was also voiced by Danny Webb between 1938 and 1939 (only in Cinderella Meets Fella (1938) and Believe It or Else (1939)), Roy Rogers in 1938, only doing a singing voice in "A Feud There Was" , well Mel voices Fudd talking in this cartoon, and radio actor Arthur Q. Bryan between 1939 and 1959, but on seven occasions during Bryan's lifetime, the voice was provided by Mel Blanc: in Good Night Elmer (1940), Blanc did Elmer's crying; in The Wacky Wabbit (1942), Blanc did Fudd's screams of fear; in The Big Snooze (1946), Blanc spoke as Fudd crying, "Oh, agony, agony!"; in The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950), only a single line was needed, and bringing in Bryan was not cost effective; in Quack Shot (1954), Blanc did Elmer's Peter Lorre-esque laugh after he is shot in the face by his toy battleship; in Wideo Wabbit (1956), Blanc did Elmer's cry of pain; and in What's Opera, Doc?, Elmer's furious scream "SMOG!" was dubbed by Blanc, although Bryan had voiced the rest of the part. In The Stupid Cupid (1944), since Elmer has no dialogue in the cartoon, Frank Graham provided his laugh. Later, during the musician's union strike of 1958, Dave Barry did the voice for Elmer's co-starring appearance in Pre-Hysterical Hare, as Bryan was ill during production of the cartoon. Elmer was originally going to be voiced in that cartoon by Daws Butler.

After his exclusive contract with WB expired in 1960, he also provided voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera. His most famous roles during this time were Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbara included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy and Captain Caveman. Blanc also provided vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry theatrical shorts directed by Chuck Jones in the mid-1960s. He was also heard in several commercials for Froot Loops as Toucan Sam and for Frito Lay as the controversial Frito Bandito. His final original voice role was the comic-strip character Heathcliff during the 1980s.

One of his final performances was in the 1988 live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which he voiced Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety and Sylvester for their appearances in the film (though Joe Alaskey voiced Yosemite Sam in Blanc's place).[2]

His final acting role was in Jetsons: The Movie, which was released one year after his death, where he reprised the role of Mr. Spacely. However, Blanc died during production of the film and had not finished recording his dialogue leading to one of Blanc's successors, Jeff Bergman, finishing his remaining dialogue. The film was dedicated to his memory alongside George O'Hanlon, who voiced George Jetson and also died during production of the movie.

Trivia[]

  • Mel has been called The Man of a Thousand Voices.
  • In the late-2000s Kids WB! series Loonatics Unleashed, one of the planets was called Blanc.

Gallery[]


Autobiography[]

References[]

  1. DeMolay International. DeMolay Hall of Fame. Retrieved on 20 October 2014.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe (1988), That's Not All Folks, Warner Books. ISBN 0446512443
  3. Mel Blanc: From Anonymity To Offscreen Superstar (The advent of on-screen voice credits). Retrieved on 18 July 2017.
  4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeAM1vwEcFg
  5. Harmetz, Aljean. "Mel Blanc: His Voice Is His Fortune", November 27, 1988. 
  6. Mel Blanc Dies; Gave Voice to Cartoon World (July 11, 1989).
  7. Wilson, Scott (2016). Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, page 68. ISBN 978-0-7864-7992-4. 
  8. Grave Hunter finds Mel Blanc burial place.
  9. Maltin, Leonard (1980). "Columbia: Charles Mintz and Screen Gems", Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. New American Library, page 214. ISBN 9780452259935. 
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