Mel Blanc enjoyed fishing. And, like a fish story, Blanc’s tale of how he came to be hired by the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio grew and changed over the years.
This Week was a newspaper magazine supplement A feature story on cartoon voice actors published October 13, 1946. This may be the earliest version about his hiring. We posted this a number of years ago on the GAC site.
Look Who's Talking!
You don't know them but their voices are famous. They give life to cartoon characters.
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.
Gee, nothing about dead casting directors or wallowing in pig-pens. A “surprise” phone call sparked it all.
Whether Mel was writing for radio shows at the time of his hiring, I can’t say. But he was certainly appearing in them. You can probably find a number of these series on old-time radio websites.
The
Oregon Daily Journal ran down some of Blanc’s radio career to date in a feature story printed June 23, 1946. It’s an overview, so don’t expect to find specific dates of shows. One thing it doesn’t mention is Blanc played a character named Sylvester on the
Judy Canova Show. Warners borrowed the name and voice for a certain cat. The radio character was more over-the-top than the cartoon character.
Mel was to start his own network radio show within a few months. All his voices couldn't save it. The show ran for one season.
Heard But Not Seen Makes a Living
By TOMMY HOXIE
(Special to The Journal)
There is a voice in Hollywood that is heard by more radio listeners than that of any other comedian . . .
one that pays off to the tune of a figure well up in the six-digit bracket—and that’s not counting the two ciphers to the right of the decimal point, either.
Yet the name of the owner of that voice won’t be found listed in any schedule of daily radio programs, for it’s Mel Blanc, the “one-man-crowd” of radio.
* * *
AND IT’S MEL’S flexibile voice that portrays Pedro and Roscoe Wortle on the Judy Canova show; the cigar store clerk and the melancholy postman on George Burns and Gracie Allen’s broadcasts; and Scottie Brown, Cartoony Technicolorovich and the chronic hiccougher of the Abbott and Costello show.
For the Jack Benny broadcasts, he portrays the train announcer, the French violin teacher, the loquacious parrot, the news reporter and Benny’s English butler. It was the latter bit of acting that won for Melvin Jerome Blanc the nomination as one of the outstanding bit parts in radio for 1945.
In addition to his four weekly radio broadcasts, Mel is busy on the Warner Bros. lot, where the voices of 90 per cent, of the masculine cartoon characters are dependent on his versatile vocal chords. It was he who devised the stuttering voice of Porkie Pig and the belligerent one of Bugs Bunny. And his new contract with Warner Bros. gives him screen credit for his voice characterizations, the first time this distinction has been given an actor in cartoons.
* * *
“PORTLAND and San Francisco both claim me,” said Mel in an interview following the rehearsal of a recent Judy Canova program. “Portland claims I was born in San Francisco, and San Francisco claims I was born in Portland.”
Actually, the man who plays so many parts on the air and on the screen was born in the Bay City 38 years ago, but moved to Portland at the age of 7.
Fellow classmates at Lincoln high school will remember Mel as the lad who began producing and directing amateur vaudeville shows at school. And in writing the skits for these shows he usually managed to feature himself as comic. It was then that Mel first to show an inkling of the career that would some day make him famous.
AS A BOY, WHEN MEL studied the violin, he never suspected that he would one day portray the role of Jack Benny’s French violin teacher. But he did know that he would never win much acclaim as a violin virtuoso in his own right. So, after eight years of study, he packed his violin away and turned his time to the tuba. With his big horn, Mel joined the staff hand at station KGW, played with some of the Northwest’s leading dance bands and filled a spot with the Portland Symphony orchestra.
It was for Portland radio listeners that Mel first aired his amazing voice dexterity when on KGW-KEX’ famous “Hoot Owls” and “Cobwebs and Nuts” broadcasts, he occasionally put aside his tuba to step up to the mike in one of a score of voices and dialects.
Some time after this, Mel began writing, producing and acting in a show of his own. But not content with putting in as many as 16 hours a day on a six-day-a week, 52-weeks-a-year job, he spent the seventh day writing the Portland Breakfast club scripts.
* * *
“IT WAS in 1935 that I left Portland for Hollywood,” Mel reminisced, “and, believe me, things weren’t easy for a while. For the first two years, I was lucky to do one show a week.
“Finally, I started getting chances at auditions and wound up with a spot on a network show. From then on, I’ve been pretty busy.”
That network show was with Al Pearce—and “pretty busy” is putting it mildly. By 1943, Mel was appearing in 14 radio shows a week and already becoming widely recognized for his movie cartoon voice characterizations. And with a half-hour radio show requiring a full day-and-night schedule.
“I finally just dropped everything except the four network shows I do now and the cartoons.”
* * *
“OH, AND BY the way,” he explained, “I never see the cartoons at all, you know. I merely do the voice part as prescribed by the script, and then later the artists draw the characters. Facial expressions and body movements are animated to match the dialogue.”
Mel can portray 57 different characters, sometimes doing as many as 8 or 10 on a single program. But his own favorites are the Burns and Allen postman and salesman Roscoe Wortle.
It was while he was doing the latter at the Judy Canova rehearsal that I saw he marked his script with a mechanical pencil with four colors of lead—a different color for each voice change.
“I always carry this pencil and a fountain pen,” he remarked. “The pencil is ideal for coding the script, and I save the pen for signing contracts.”
IT IS NOT ONLY his voice that Mel uses in his radio characterizations. His whole body fits into character as he strives to inject into each one a complete naturalness. When he assumes the character of the lazy Pedro, he slouches at the microphone and cocks his head to one side. Then on the same show, when he returns as Roscoe Wortle, he stands erect and straightforward.
In the few recreational hours his busy schedule allows. Mel fishes, plays with 7-year-old son Noel and does the buying for a successful Venice, Cal., hardware store which he started as a hobby. His merchandise features sporting goods with an accent on fishing equipment. His father-in-law operates the business while Mel operates his larnyx.
It is at their ocean-view home at Playa Del Ray, near Santa Monica that Mrs. Blanc (Estelle) and Noel listen to the radio so that when he comes back from the studio they can serve as critics to Daddy.
“I get a little homesick for Portland now and then,” Mel said as we left the studio,” “and maybe one of these days I’ll be able to take Estelle and Noel and go back there. You see they have the best fishing up there, and all the time I lived in Portland I never went fishing. Now it is my hobby, and I’d really like to try out my tackle on some of those big ones that get away.”
Blanc’s hiring by Treg Brown came at a time when the Schlesinger studio had decided to bring in professional actors; after all, Warner Bros. owned KFWB radio with all kinds of actors at its disposal. Billy Bletcher is probably the best known of the earliest pros. Not too much later came Danny Webb and Elvia Allman, joining seamstress-turned-actress Berneice Hansell. That early group seemed to find work at most of the West Coast studios. Blanc’s voice can be easily spotted in cartoons produced by Charlie Mintz for Columbia, and almost every cartoon fan knows he was the original voice of Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz (and, later, on children’s LPs).
Mel Blanc outshone all the others. His expressiveness, accents, even singing, was perfect for animated comedies, where Warner Bros. had become the top dog (or, bunny, perhaps). The dialogue got better and better as the 1940s wore on. In turn, Blanc’s performances got better and better. No doubt he inspired many, many others who followed. Mel Blanc really was the best cartoon actor of all time.
What’s that, you say? This is a perfect opportunity to plug Keith Scott’s two-volume history of actors in animated cartoons, you say? Why, indeed this is.
I can’t say enough good things about this set, which needed to be written. Only Keith, with his meticulous research and attentive ear, could write it.
Check out the BearManor Media site for more. Keith has the full Mel Blanc story. Without any fish.
