About me:
I was born in San Francisco, California. I had grown up in Portland, Oregon, attending Lincoln High School. At the age of 16, I changed the spelling of my last name, from “Blank” to “Blanc.” As Blanc, I was working as a voice actor in the radio industry, when my ability to create voices for multiple characters had first attracted attention. I was a regular on the Jack Benny Program, in various roles, including Benny’s automobile, the Maxwell that was in desperate need of a tune up, the violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, and Benny’s pet polar bear, Carmichael.
My success on the Jack Benny Program led to my own radio show on the CBS radio network, The Mel Blanc Show, which had run from September 3, 1946 to June 24, 1947. I played as myself, the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, in addition to a wide range of comical support characters. Other regular characters were played by Mary Jane Croft, Joseph Kearns, Hans Conried, Alan Reed, Jim Backus, and Bea Benaderat.
I also had appeared on other national radio programs, such as: Burns and Allen as the Happy Postman, August Moon on Point Sublime, Sad Sack on G.I. Journal, Floyd the Barber on The Great Gildersleeve, and later played various small parts on Benny’s television show. My most memorable routine from Benny’s radio and TV programs is called “Sy, the little Mexican” in which I spoke only one word at a time. The famous “si…Sy….sew….Sue” routine was so effective that no matter how many times it was performed, the laughter was always there, thanks to the comedic timing of myself and Benny. Another of my famous roles on Jack’s show was the Union Train Depot announcer who inevitable intoned, sidelong: “Train leaving on Track Five for Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga.” What had made that phrase so funny was the pregnant pause that evolved over time between “cuc…” and “….amonga” – eventually minutes would pass while the skit went on, the audience awaiting the inevitable conclusion of the word. For my contribution to radio, I have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6385 Hollywood Blvd.
I had joined Leon Schlesinger Studios (the subsidiary of Warner Brothers Pictures, which produced animated cartoons) in 1936. I soon became noted for voicing a wide variety of cartoon characters, including: Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and many others. My natural voice was that of Sylvester the cat but without the lispy spray (you can hear it in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, which also featured a frequent vocal foil, Bea Benaderet, in my small appearance, I play a vexed cab-driver).
Though my best-known character was a carrot-chomping rabbit, I was allergic to raw carrots, they caused my vocal cords to swell and prevent me from speaking easily. No other vegetable produced the desired crunch, however, so I would save the “carrot-eating” sections of Bugs Bunny’s dialogue for the end of the recording session, when I could chomp a raw carrot, say my lines, and then hawk a mouthful of chewed carrot into a convenient wastebasket. My most challenging job was the voicing of Yosemite Sam; it was rough on the throat because of Sam’s sheer volume.
My long association with the theatrical cartons of Warner Brothers gave me an edge over the made-for-TV voice actors like the two greats Daws Butler and Don Messick. Although Daws and don both had voice roles in MGM theatrical cartoons (Daws being the southern talking wolf who always whistled and Don at times being “Droopy”), the two didn’t do as many theatricals as I did.
On January 24, 1961, I was involved in a near-fatal auto accident on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. Hit head-on, I suffered a triple skull fracture that left me in a coma for three weeks, and fractures of both legs and the pelvis.
The accident prompted over 15,000 get-well cards from anxious fans, including some addressed on to “Bugs Bunny, Hollywood, USA”. The reports in my autobiography, state that I was awakened from my coma by a clever doctor who addressed me as Bugs Bunny, and therefore credits Bugs with saving my life.
I had returned home from the UCLA Medical Center on March 17th, to the cheer of more than 150 friends and neighbors. I was not so happy on March 22nd, when I filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles. My accident, one of 26 in the preceding two years at the intersection, resulted in the city quickly providing money to reconstruct curves at the dangerous corner.
At the time of the accident, I served as the voice of Barney Rubble on ABS’s The Flinstones. My absence from the show was relatively brief after the show’s producers set up recording equipment in my house to allow me to work from my residence. I also returned to “The Jack Benny Show” to film the program’s 1961 Christmas show, moving around via crutches and/or a wheelchair.
In the early 1960s, I went to Hanna-Barbera and continued to voice various characters, with Barney Rubble from The Flinstones (whose dopey laugh is very similar to Foghorn Leghorn’s booming chuckle) and Mr. Spacely from The Jetsons being my most famous. Daws Butler and Don Messick were Hanna-Barbera’s top voice men, and I was the newcomer to H-B. However, all of the 1930s and 1940s theatrical cartoons from Warner Brothers were making their way to Saturday morning TV to compete with the made-for-TV Hanna-Barberas and I was once more deemed relevant. Warner Bros then started to make first-run cartoon shorts for TV in the late ‘60s, mostly shorts consisting of Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales or Tweety and Silvester (I had been forbidden by Hanna-Barbera to voice Bugs Bunny). I did these voices plus the ones I did for the ensemble cartoons like Wacky Races and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop for Hanna-Barbera. I even shared the spotlight with my two rivals and personal friends, Daws Butler and Don Messick. In a short called Lippy the Lion, Daws was Lippy while I was his side-kick, Hardy Har-Har. In the short Ricochet Rabbit, Don provided the voice of the gun slinging rabbit while I was his sidekick, Deputy Droop-a-Long.
I was one of hundreds of individuals that George Lucas auditioned to provide the voice for the character of C-3PO for his 1977 motion picture Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and it was he who ultimately suggested that the producers utilize mime actor Anthony Daniels’ own voice in the role.
After spending most of two seasons voicing the robot Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25the Century, my last original character was an orange cat named Heathcliff, who spoke a little like my famed Bugs Bunny, but with a more street touch demeanor. This was the early 1980s. I continued to voice my famous characters in commercials and TV specials for most of the decade, although I often left the “yelling” characters like Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn and the Tasmanian Devil to other voice actors as performing these were too hard on my throat and voice by the time of my old age in the 1980s. One of my last recording sessions was for a new animated theatrical version of The Jetsons, Jetsons:The Movie.
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