I have created another “header” for ye olde blogge…I have several of these in rotation and the new one features prominently “that Oscar-winning wabbit” Bugs Bunny.
I saw Bugs and Daffy and Tweety and the gang 3 or 4 hours a week between weekday afternoons and the epic 90-minute “Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show” on Saturday mornings. So as a kid I got to be very, very familiar with the voice of Mel Blanc. As I got into old time radio I heard him all over the place, mostly on Jack Benny’s radio and television programs as a variety of characters. His voice is all over the place, many times uncredited but instantly recognizable.
Mel voiced a cavalcade of timeless characters in Looney Tunes animated shorts from the late 1930’s thru the late ’60s. These films, made for adult filmgoing audiences, found their way on television and were a fixture on Saturday morning TV for four decades.
One of the things I learned as I started reading up on the great voices of radio and animation is that Mel Blanc wasn’t responsible for quite EVERY Looney Tunes voice. Female roles were handled by June Foray and Bea Benederet (who played Betty to Mel’s Barney on “The Flintstones.”). A variety of male roles were done by my advertising idol Stan Freberg in his earliest days in Hollywood, usually pairing with Mel as Hubie and Bertie (the mice playing tricks on Claude Cat) or the Goofy Gophers (“Oh, yes!” “Indubitably!”) or the little dog Chester to Mel’s beefy bulldog Spike:
Mel’s most frequent co-star in the Warner Bros. cartoon days was Arthur Q. Bryan. Bryan’s Elmer Fudd was such a unique characterization that no other actor–even Mel himself–could recreate it after Bryan’s death in the late 50’s. Listen to the classic duet from “What’s Opera Doc”:
Mel Blanc continued voicing the characters in CBS primetime specials, TV commercials, records, theme park material and feature-length films until his death in 1989.