“What’s Up, Doc?” Mel Blanc: The Man Behind 3,000 Cartoon Voices

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And our next story is an unforgettable tale about an American icon whose voice everyone recognizes.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Here’s Greg Hangler.

00:00:23
Speaker 3: If you added up all the hours from your childhood, chances are the voice of Mel Blanc made up the majority of dialogues spoken to you: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Pepe Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Elmer Fudd, Barney Rubble, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, and the Tasmanian Devil, to name just a few of Blanc’s voice contributions. This man embodied a sense of innocence and good nature, and was so adored and respected that all who knew him had something to say about him. For the sake of time, I won’t be introducing all those who contributed to this story. They are fellow animators, inkers, and painters from Warner Brothers, Disney, and Hanna-Barbera animation and film historians, directors, voice artists like Hank Azaria from The Simpsons, Mel’s former agents, film critics, his son Noel, and friends such as Kirk Douglas. Without any further ado, let’s jump right into the story of Mel Blanc, the Man of a Thousand Voices.

00:01:36
Speaker 4: Allow me to introduce myself: Mel Blanc. What an amazing guy. What a camp guy.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: Oh.

00:01:45
Speaker 5: You can’t look at the Warner Brothers characters without hearing his sound.

00:01:51
Speaker 6: His voice.

00:01:55
Speaker 7: There’s such a delight to the sound of his voice in every character he did.

00:01:58
Speaker 8: What I think about it today is that everybody imitates these characters he created. The gosh.

00:02:08
Speaker 9: Groovy duck. That my little chub is strictly I’m not her of opinion.

00:02:14
Speaker 6: Mel was so unique at what he did.

00:02:19
Speaker 8: Mel had the range that everyone wishes for.

00:02:28
Speaker 10: Great horny toads, I’m up North. Gotta burn my boots.

00:02:33
Speaker 6: They touched Yankees oil.

00:02:35
Speaker 9: I think it was a shock when I got older to discover all those voices were one man.

00:02:39
Speaker 11: His voice was like more powerful than a human body could contain, so it seemed to be coming out of every part of him.

00:02:59
Speaker 4: Mel Blanc had this phenomenal voice box.

00:03:02
Speaker 12: That’s the only way I can explain it. He just did all kinds of things that were just amazing.

00:03:08
Speaker 13: Wow.

00:03:10
Speaker 8: He didn’t just do voices. He played characters, and there’s a difference.

00:03:17
Speaker 4: He was just able to do that, to just totally, like, you know, animate with his voice, to create a complete three-dimensional character, just with his voice alone.

00:03:26
Speaker 6: No chickens, I’m a chicken roast.

00:03:30
Speaker 4: How can you beat a pair of vocal cords that had an eight-octave range, perfect pitch, great singer, and an incredible actor? There’s Mel, and there’s like everybody else. There.

00:03:39
Speaker 8: Was nobody better than Mel Blanc. Nice.

00:03:43
Speaker 4: You know what is it?

00:03:44
Speaker 6: A cat.

00:03:44
Speaker 9: Howdy do.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: How about that?

00:03:47
Speaker 4: Age.

00:03:51
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:03:57
Speaker 3: Melvin Jerome Blanc was born the youngest of two children on May 30th, 1908, in San Francisco, to Russian Jewish parents, Frederic and Eva. After leaving New York to seek his fortune prospecting for gold in the Klondike region of the Alaskan Yukon, his father eventually settled the family down in Portland, Oregon. As a young boy, growing up in the melting pot of the American West, Mel Blanc would forever be affected by the medley of foreign accents and the way voices defined personalities.

00:04:32
Speaker 4: My dad was always interested in voices and in music, and in singing and entertaining. He started to entertain in grammar school.

00:04:39
Speaker 14: From around about the age of 10, Mel Blanc was very interested in dialects: Yiddish dialects, and Chinese and Japanese dialects, Russian, the.

00:04:46
Speaker 15: School assembly, the grammar school. I would entertain the kids with a dialect story or one of a different dialect each time, and the kids loved it, and they got such a big kick out of it. They laughed, and the teachers laughed, and then gave me lousy marks.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: Here’s what Mel wrote in his autobiography, That’s Not All Folks: “Except for music class, I loathed school. To be truthful, report cards C’s and D’s had little to no effect on me. But that applause. What an impression it made on a 12-year-old.”

00:05:24
Speaker 6: Now where’d that boy go? You gotta be a magician to keep a kid’s attention more than two minutes.

00:05:29
Speaker 3: “Nowadays, my talents weren’t appreciated by all, in particular a crotchety old teacher by the name of Washburn. When I broke up a classroom discussion by giving an answer in four different voices, she reprimanded me sternly. Too sternly if you ask me. ‘You’ll never amount to anything,’ she said scornfully. ‘You’re just like your last name: Blank.’ Her stinging insult so shamed me that when I was 16, I started spelling my surname with a C, B-L-A-N-C, instead of a K. Later, as an adult, I changed it legally. I often wondered if Mrs. Washburn associated Mel Blanc with the young student she had ridiculed so many years before.”

00:06:26
Speaker 4: He dropped out of high school in about the ninth grade.

00:06:28
Speaker 1: I used to say, “I got lousy grades, but I developed some great voices because of the echo in his school in the hallways.”

00:06:36
Speaker 4: He started leading orchestras. He was an orchestra conductor, and the orchestras moved all around the Oregon area, in the Washington area, Northern California area. In between, when he was conducting the music, he would do shtick. He’d do different voices and different comedy routines. Mel was the youngest orchestra leader in the country at that time, at 17.

00:06:56
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to the story of Mel Blanc, and it all starts in radio. Mel was persistent, by the way, all those turndowns, all those times people telling him no, and he kept pushing and pushing and finally gets paired up with the legendary Chuck Jones. It starts with Porky Pig and then a bunny named Bugs. When we come back, more of the story of Mel Blanc here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And we do it all from the heart of the South, Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows will always be free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com. Give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Mel Blanc, the man behind 3,000 cartoon voices, the man behind Looney Tunes, and so much else. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:08:25
Speaker 4: I think my dad never thought of Hollywood when he was young. He thought of going on the radio when radio was quite new at that time.

00:08:32
Speaker 3: And of course, radio is ideal for a schooling for someone who was going to do cartoon voices. In 1932, with the blessing of his parents, he jumped into his 1920 Ford Model A convertible and drove south to Los Angeles, hoping to find a break. Instead, he met a young woman named Estelle Rosenbaum, a bright and attractive girl with a radiant smile who would become his biggest supporter for the rest of his life. She also shared Mel’s deep interest in radio. Mel, 24, and Estelle, 22, married that spring and then proceeded up Route 101 back to Portland to write, produce, and perform their own sketch radio show called “Cobwebs and Nuts.” To maintain audience interest six hours a week, Mel had to come up with countless voices and lots of material, which was then presented to Mel’s one-woman audience for approval.

00:09:30
Speaker 4: My dad played 100 different male characters; my mother played all the different female characters, and they had a great time. Although they were only paid $15 a week to write it, produce it, and voice it.

00:09:43
Speaker 3: The show failed to provide a livable wage for the Blancs, so Mel seriously considered quitting in order to become an insurance salesman at a whopping $50 a week. Thanks to Estelle’s encouragement, he rejected the offer and followed his dreams and talents back to Los Angeles in 1935. Here are Estelle’s exact words: “Mel, if we’re going to be broke, at least let’s be broke someplace where it’s warm.”

00:10:14
Speaker 15: I had seen some of the Warner, by the voice or heard some of the voices in the cartoons, and I thought, “Geez, they’re missing out on an awful lot.”

00:10:23
Speaker 6: Their voices are pretty bad.

00:10:24
Speaker 15: Usually Norman Spencer was there to greet him. I said, “I’d like to audition for you and show you what I can do.” He says, “Sorry. We’ve got all the voices we need.” I said, “But Mr. Schlesinger said that you were the one.” And he says, “No, I’m sorry.” Well, I was as stubborn as he was, and I went back in two weeks and I said, “Look, won’t you just listen to me?” He says, “I told you we have all the voices we need.” So I was still as stubborn as him, and I went to him every two weeks asking him to please listen to me, and he says, “I told you a hundred times, I’ve got all the voices we need.”

00:10:56
Speaker 4: So he kept knocking on the door for two years.

00:11:00
Speaker 3: Finally, in March of 1937, Mel’s perseverance paid off.

00:11:07
Speaker 2: It was probably the week before Christmas.

00:11:10
Speaker 15: He came looking for a job, and that day Treg Brown was sitting there.

00:11:15
Speaker 4: Treg Brown, brilliant sound effects man for the Warner cartoons. He happened to take over when this fellow passed away that wouldn’t let my dad in the door.

00:11:24
Speaker 15: And I said, “Mr. Brown, I’ve been trying to get in here to audition.”

00:11:28
Speaker 6: Just have him hear me.

00:11:29
Speaker 15: “The guy kept saying, ‘No, I’ve got all the voices what you need.'” He said, “Let me hear what you do.” So I auditioned for him and he got a big kick out of it. He said, “Would you do it again for the directors?” I said, “Gladly.”

00:11:42
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers decided to give Mel a shot in a supporting role for Picador Porky, a new cartoon animated by a 25-year-old lanky kid named Chuck Jones, featuring the studio’s latest character, Porky Pig.

00:11:57
Speaker 15: He said, “I’ve got a cartoon coming up with a drunken bull. Do you think you can do the voice of a drunken bull?” So I said, “Yeah, I think I could.” He says, “How would he talk?”

00:12:10
Speaker 6: I had her talk like a.

00:12:15
Speaker 15: Look, look off for a sour Max. He says, “Great. Great.” He says, “What are you doing next Tuesday?” I wasn’t doing a thing. I said, “I think I can make it.”

00:12:29
Speaker 10: Caw-caw-caw-caw-caw-caw, playing on the old guitar. Caw-caw-caw-caw-caw-caw, playing on the under darn, caw-caw-caw-caw-caw-caw, playing on the old me.

00:12:42
Speaker 3: Warner Brothers quickly recognized Mel’s talent and offered him the prize role of Porky Pig.

00:12:48
Speaker 15: He says, “He’s a timid little character.” I told him, “All I want to be real authentic about it.” So I went out to a pig farm and wallowed around with the pigs for a couple of weeks. And they kicked me out. So, “Go home and take a bath!” When I did, I backed, I said, “If a pig could talk, he’d talk with a grunt, you know.”

00:13:05
Speaker 6: “That’s how Porky talked with a grunt.” “It is an all great, great!”

00:13:16
Speaker 9: Don’t worry, he’s making it at.

00:13:17
Speaker 16: It in the moment launch.

00:13:21
Speaker 14: In that same cartoon, he introduced a kind of embryonic version of Daffy Duck.

00:13:26
Speaker 15: No matter worry, I’m just crazy.

00:13:28
Speaker 12: Don’t pull now.

00:13:30
Speaker 14: He’s a guy suddenly doing the craziest, most energetic voices they’ve ever had in one cartoon. And I think that’s when they suddenly thought, “I think we’re going to hang on to this guy.”

00:13:39
Speaker 3: It was Porky Pig and Daffy Duck that put Leon Schlesinger’s Warner Brothers Cartoon Company and Mel on the map. But it was another character, a cool, sly, and wisecracking rabbit with a flair for survival named Bugs Bunny, who would become his most famous and unforgettable creation. Bugs made his cartoon debut on July 27th, 1940, in an eight-minute and fifteen-second short titled A Wild Hare.

00:14:10
Speaker 15: They showed me a picture of this little rabbit, and he’s going to say, “Hey, what’s cooking?” I said, “Instead of him saying, ‘Hey, what’s cooking,’ why don’t you have him.”

00:14:18
Speaker 6: Say, “Hey, what’s up, Doc?” That’s the new expression that was being so popular.

00:14:24
Speaker 15: And I said to Mistress Schlesinger, I said, “Why don’t you name him after the guy who.”

00:14:27
Speaker 6: Drew the first picture of him? His name was Bugs Hardaway.

00:14:31
Speaker 15: “Why don’t you call him Bugs Bunny?”

00:14:41
Speaker 6: What’s up, Doc? It’s a rabbit down here and I’m trying to catch him.

00:14:46
Speaker 15: Well, he told me that Bugs was a tough little stinker, and I thought, “What kind of a voice can I give him?”

00:14:52
Speaker 6: The tough character, maybe Brooklyn or the Bronx.

00:14:55
Speaker 9: So I put the two of them together, Doc, and that’s how Bugs Bunny came out.

00:15:00
Speaker 16: But you know, you would just whine like a rabbit and gimme here. Listen, Doc. Now don’t spread this around, but.

00:15:12
Speaker 6: Confidentially, I am a wabbit.

00:15:17
Speaker 3: The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject Cartoons. Over the next 20 years, Mel would give life to nearly the entire cast of Looney Tunes characters.

00:15:36
Speaker 6: They have pretensions, hummish, I am, I might.

00:15:39
Speaker 3: Be the.

00:15:41
Speaker 4: Daffy is not a lisp. People say, “Daffy’s lisping, spraying the water out of the film.” It’s not a lisp. By the way, Tweety was a little baby bird, so I gave him a little tiny baby voice.

00:15:56
Speaker 9: Oh, I could I go a putty tad?

00:15:58
Speaker 17: And Sylvester was a big slop cat, so I gave him a big, sloppy voice. Speedy Gonzales was a little tiny mouse, and he had to talk fast because his name was Speedy. So I gave him a very fast little voice and said, “My name is Speedy Gonzales.” And when I came to give me, “You don’t mind,” I think you can understand what the, I think.

00:16:22
Speaker 9: Just a think, radiant flower, you do not have to come with me to the gas bar.

00:16:28
Speaker 2: We are already.

00:16:31
Speaker 18: He chased the pussy cat and catched him and kissed him. I gave him a more or less of a French voice, like so a voila. And I said, “Only French, what’s wrong?”

00:16:43
Speaker 16: You know?

00:16:44
Speaker 14: All.

00:16:44
Speaker 6: You skunks, clear hair, Yosemite Sam.

00:16:48
Speaker 17: They showed me it was a little cowboy and he was only two feet tall with long red hair and had to be recognized. So I had to give him a recognizable voice, so I.

00:16:57
Speaker 6: Gave a real loud, “Lay, oh, my name’s Yosemite Sam.” This is one that almost gets me every time I use it.

00:17:07
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to the story of Mel Blanc, and we learned that he wasn’t just a great voice man.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: He didn’t just create great characters.

00:17:15
Speaker 1: He didn’t just have great timing, nearly perfect comic timing and comic pitch. But he really was one of the great actors to ever come out of Hollywood. And by the way, he got this compliment about being a great actor from none other than Jack Benny and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, and anyone who’s ever acted knows comedy is the hardest because you’ve got to play it straight. You don’t play it for laughs. When we come back, more of Mel Blanc, his story, the man behind 3,000 cartoon voices. Here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Mel Blanc.

00:18:13
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:15
Speaker 3: Arriving on the screen shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Bugs became a symbol of American strength in the face of the enemy.

00:18:23
Speaker 14: The tall man with.

00:18:25
Speaker 9: High hat. We’ll become a down your way, get your savings out. When you hear him shout, “Any bunch today?” Come on and get them, folks. Come on, skip kind of.

00:18:35
Speaker 14: Gump, because of what was happening in Europe and the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Audiences just found his sassy control of the situation, just so heroic coolness in the face of danger.

00:18:46
Speaker 6: Damn what chip gack? What’s up?

00:18:50
Speaker 10: Doc?

00:18:52
Speaker 6: Listen, stranger? This town ain’t big enough for the two of us?

00:18:56
Speaker 4: It ain’t.

00:18:58
Speaker 3: The Blancs gave birth to their only child on October 19th, 1938, a son named Noel. This stretched the Blanc household budget to the breaking point. At his wife’s urging, Mel decided to ask for a salary increase from the tight-fisted, savvy head of Warner Brothers Cartoons, Leon Schlesinger.

00:19:20
Speaker 6: Hello, Porky, come on.