Ferdinand Blanc

In the 1940s, if you were interested about whose voices you heard in a cartoon you just watched, you were almost out of luck. Mel Blanc started getting screen credit on some Warner Bros. cartoons at the start of 1944; voice historian Keith Scott goes into this in depth in this post.

Other screen credits involving voice work in that decade were rare exceptions.

However, going back to the 1930s, newspapers occasionally wrote about cartoon actors, revealing names never seen on a theatre screen. Leon Schlesinger was no dummy when it came to public relations. He had Rose Horsley on staff to get publicity, in the trades, in the popular press and magazines. It would appear blurbs about the voice of Bugs Bunny made good newspaper copy, as there were a number of stories about Blanc.

He is quoted in this feature article in This Week magazine, one of a host of weekend newspaper supplements. It was published Oct. 13, 1946. Though it’s not mentioned, by this point Blanc had parlayed cartoon publicity and a lot of supporting work on the air into his own network radio sitcom.

Look Who's Talking!
You don't know them but their voices are famous. They give life to cartoon characters.
By SUZANNE V. HORVATH
The success of every animated cartoon depends on the talents of a highly specialized group of people—the men and women who speak for them.
Moviegoers everywhere know the Hollywood artists and the product of their magic inkwells. But it’s to the unknown “voices,” on these pages, that cartoon studios turn when a new character pops up. These people get no special training, have to depend on their imagination and a talent for mimicry. The artists or directors can’t be of much help, beyond a vague request to “talk like a rabbit,” or “say this like a timid ghost.”
In 1928 Walt Disney had a brain storm and brought forth a “Mouse.” A year later Mickey made his first noise and Disney hasn't stopped talking for him since.
Then there is Popeye, whose years of popularity make Bob Hope look like a Johnny-Come-Lately.
But in recent years many favorites have come along to where they get top billing, have their own following of fans:
Warner Brothers have Humphrey Bogart and buck-toothed Bugs Bunny, whose box-office rating adds up to a mint of carrots. Famous Studios have under contract, besides Popeye and his troop, Little Lulu and a small newcomer called Casper, the Friendly Ghost. Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse, are friendly enemies at M-G-M. Terry Toons made stars of two magpies.
For each of these, and others, a man or woman plays a major role. All are talented mimics and work into the animated-cartoon world quite casually.
Bugs Bunny’s Mel Blanc, for instance, was writing radio shows when he got a call from the office of Treg Brown of Warner Brothers’ cartoon department. “Can you play a drunken bull?” asked Brown.
“My best friends call me Ferdinand,” replied the surprised Mel.
The drunken bull is now a forgotten character, but Mel has become one of the animated cartoon world’s greatest talkers.
Walt Disney gave life, stardom and a voice to a mouse. Mickey made his first appearance on a pad of paper while Disney was traveling in an upper berth. He was so impressed with his wide-eyed sketch that he gave it a name, and put it in pictures. A year later Disney spoke Mickey’s first words. He’s been doing it for 18 years, and is heard from Singapore to Schenectady.
Audience in a frenzy, watching Little Lulu’s movie?” Lulu gets her voice from tall, heavy-set Cecile Roy, whose versatile talents have earned her the title, “Girl of a Thousand Voices.” Recently Mrs. Roy topped her own record of “voices from cradle to grave” by playing an embryo. Time-off, she keeps house for her 15-year-old son, who wants to be her press agent.
Slight resemblance between Casper, the Ghost, and Arnold Stang, the Voice, is probably accidental. Casper is a newcomer to the entertainment world. Twenty-two-year-old Arnold is an old-timer with 15 years of radio, movies and Broadway shows. Usually in Casper Milquetoast roles, he fooled the casting directors by getting the part of "Spit" in "Dead End."



You don’t need me to tell you more about Mel Blanc or Arnold Stang (I didn’t realise he voiced Casper) but perhaps some information about Cecile Roy is in order.

My guess is she added the ‘e’ on the end of her first name for professional reasons to prevent casting directors from thinking she was a man. She was born Cecil Hildegarde Edwards on October 2, 1900 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The family soon moved to Oklahoma, and by 1910, had settled in Colorado. She married Eugene Alfred Roy, a Canadian employed as a steamfitter, in 1926. Four years later, the two and their son were living in Chicago where she was selling encyclopaedias.

Roy turned to acting, first with a stock company in Chicago, then on radio by 1935. She appeared on Kaltenmeyer’s Kindergarten on WMAQ in the late ‘30s. During the war, Roy went on to New York City and piled up a list of radio credits including Perry Mason, Ma Perkins, The Aldrich Family, Rise of the Goldbergs, When a Girl Marries, Pepper Young’s Family and so on. She died at the Actors' Extended Care Facility in Englewood, New Jersey at the age of 94 on January 26, 1995.