Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,656

This is the grave of Mel Blanc.

Born in 1908 in San Francisco, Melvin Blank, grew up in a Jewish immigrant household, first in his birth place and then in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated from Lincoln High School. From the time he was a kid, he liked funny voices. He was a funny guy, he had the voices, and honestly, like every elementary school has the funny voice kid. They don’t usually end up making a career of it, but he did. Of course his teachers hated him. In fact, the reason he claimed he changed his name is that a teacher, mad at him for goofing off again in class, told him that he would end up like his last name, a total blank. Can you imagine saying that to a kid? Yikes. Anyway, Mel Blanc it became.

Serious about his voices and his ability to make people laugh, he started doing vaudeville up and down the west coast by the time he was in high school. By 1927, he worked on KGW’s The Hoot Owls, a Portland-based comedy show. That got attention from the big leagues in Los Angeles. He spent the first half of the 30s moving back and forth from LA to Portland, doing various radio shows. But he was in LA permanently by 1935. He rose pretty quickly and was a staple of several radio shows, most notably The Jack Benny Show. His big break was when Benny had a recording of an automobile synced up, but the recording got screwed up. Blanc grabbed the mic and just did the sound real fast. A very impressed Benny came to rely on Blanc more and more. Beginning in 1946, Blanc got his own show on CBS. The Mel Blanc Show only ran for one season, ending in the spring of 1947, but it gave a lot of old-time radio actors work and Blanc was well-known enough as a genius of the voice that the advertising just assumed everyone knew who he was.

This is all fine and good, but let’s just cut to the chase–Mel Blanc was the voice of most of the Looney Tunes characters and of course was wonderful. Bugs Bunny is one of the great all-time characters. Of course it wasn’t just Blanc who made this great, but playing him as Groucho Marx but a rabbit was fantastic. He was most of the rest of the cast too–Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Tasmanian Devil, and eventually he took over Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd as well. I will say that a lot of these characters are based on speech impediments and I am surprised this doesn’t get discussed more. I don’t know that it takes away from the amazing quality of voice work Blanc brought to Looney Tunes, but there is a part of this that makes it as hard to watch as Porky Pig flying to “Darkest Africa,” to mention just one of the episodes with overt racism. However, it was the times and this stuff was all over popular entertainment. I think we’d be doing ourselves a massive disservice to avoid this material because it doesn’t fit with the sensibilities of the 2020s American liberal, but we would also be doing society a massive disservice to not talk about its problems.

Luckily, there’s no reason to do anything with Bugs Bunny than love him and Blanc’s work.

Blanc was also the voice for the Private SNAFU series of training animation films for World War II soldiers. This is pretty amazing work too. He was great, sounding a good deal like Bugs, but training soldiers–and let’s face it, most of these guys were completely uneducated and ignorant about the world and mostly just really excited to get with exotic women–to watch for things like spies and not just telling the world what their ship was up to when they got drunk in port. You can watch a bunch of these on YouTube and if you haven’t, it’s worth your time.

Later, Blanc moved over to Hanna-Barbera and did most of the great voice work of a generation for their cartoons. That included being the voice of both Barney Rubble and Dino on The Flintstones, Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons, Secret Squirrel on The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, and other more minor work in cartoons that I don’t really remember. He also had originated the voice and laugh for Woody Woodpecker back in 1940 before he signed with Warner Brothers. Universal, which owned Woody’s rights, kept Blanc’s laugh until 1951.

One thing about Blanc–he wanted to be paid. This was a career. In an era where voice actors often got screwed out of their rights, Blanc was a pioneer in taking legal action when his intellectual property was violated. He ensured that his Warner Brothers contract would require that anything he did included the line “Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc.” But he didn’t receive full credit for all his work until 1946. It took a full six years to fight for his rights.

In the late 60s, Blanc originated the voice of Toucan Sam for Fruit Loops commercials. When Warner Brothers tried to cash in on Looney Tunes in the late 60s and 70s by bringing the characters back for new work, Blanc agreed to voice most of it. Has anyone seen this stuff? I don’t remember it anyway, though it could hardly be worse than Space Jam and its sequel in terms of just cynically cashing in on intellectual property for a new generation.

In 1961, Blanc was in a very serious car accident and was in a coma for a week. This sounds apocryphal but is evidently true. When the doctors were trying to get him to come out of the coma, they struggled to get him to respond until they asked “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?” and then he responded in his Bugs voice. They then followed that with asking the same about Tweety and he responded as well then too and started on the road to recovery. Luckily for him, other than just surviving, he had trained his son Noel in how to do the voices and Noel basically took over for him for awhile while he recovered.

Blanc remained active later in life. He did American Express commercials. He was even the voice of the father in Strange Brew! He did his old Looney Tunes voices for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? His last work was for Jetsons; The Movie, which was released in 1990. By that time, Blanc was gone. He died in 1989, at the age of 81. Given that he smoked like a chimney his entire life, he was lucky to get that many years, but the cigarettes are what did him in.

Mel Blanc is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California. I absolutely love that someone left carrots at the grave.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in Looney Tunes, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Friz Freleng is in Culver City, California and Carl Stalling is evidently also at Hollywood Forever and now I am kicking myself for not seeing him, though it was getting close to sunset when I visited and I ran out of time. Big cemetery and lots of grave work to do in LA so let’s make it happen! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.