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Mel Blanc

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Melvin Jerome "Mel" Blanc (30 May 1908 – 10 July 1989) was an American voice actor, comedian, radio personality, and recording artist. Although he began his over-sixty-year career performing in radio, he is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros. as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and many of the other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical short films, during the Golden Age of Animation.

Biography

Blanc was born in San Francisco to Russian-Jewish parents in 1908. As a kid, he grew up in Portland, Oregon. While growing up, he had a thing for voices and dialect, which he started to voice at the age of ten. At sixteen, he claimed that he changed the spelling of his name from "Blank" to "Blanc", because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank". Blanc joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame.[1]

Blanc is known to have some musical knowledge. After graduating from high school in 1927, he split his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of nineteen, and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon, and northern California.[2]

His voice acting career with Warner Bros. began in 1937 with the cartoon short "Picador Porky", in which he voices two hobos who disguise themselves as a drunken bull. By 1944, Blanc had become the first voice actor to receive on-screen credit for his work, beginning with the Bugs Bunny short "Little Red Riding Rabbit".[3] According to Blanc's autobiography, he was given this exclusivity by Leon Schlesinger in exchange for not getting a raise.[2] The compromise enabled Blanc become a favorite voice actor to cast for other productions, even though it meant his fellow players in the company like June Foray would work in relative obscurity for years more.

Having earned the nickname "The Man of 1,000 Voices," Blanc is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice-acting industry. Over the span of his career, he was in over five thousand cartoons and did over four hundred different voices for them.[4]

Looney Roles

also see Category:Characters voiced by Mel Blanc and Category:Cartoons with characters voiced by Mel Blanc.

Other Voice Work

In addition to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Blanc had done voice work for cartoon studios including Disney, Screen Gems, MGM, and Universal before he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros in 1941. For Disney, Blanc had recorded dialogue for Gideon the Cat, Honest John's sidekick, from Pinocchio, but went unused after the studio decided to make him mute similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the only material that remains of him includes three hiccups that he had recorded. At the MGM cartoon studio, Blanc had done voice work for cartoons that were directed by Looney Tunes co-creator Hugh Harman where he would often play leading parts such as the squirrel grandfather in the Oscar nominated short "Peace on Earth" and the titular character in "Tom Turkey and His Harmonica Humdingers", along with voicing John Silver in the ill-fated The Captain and the Kids film series and Count Screwloose in two cartoons that were directed by cartoonist Milt Gross. He also did voice work for the Screen Gems cartoon studio including the first Fox and the Crow cartoon "The Fox and the Grapes" which was directed by Frank Tashlin. Blanc was also the original voice of Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz Productions, but only voiced the character in his first few theatrical shorts. However, he did reprise his role in recordings for Capitol Records from 1948 until 1955.

After his exclusive contract with WB expired in 1960, he also provided voices for the TV cartoons produced by Hanna-Barbera. His most famous roles during this time were Barney Rubble of The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely of The Jetsons. His other voice roles for Hanna-Barbara included Dino the Dinosaur, Secret Squirrel, Speed Buggy and Captain Caveman. Blanc also provided vocal effects for the Tom and Jerry theatrical shorts directed by Chuck Jones in the mid-1960s, and voiced the comic-strip character Heathcliff during the 1980s (his final original voice role).

One of his final performances was in the 1988 live-action/animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which he voiced Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety and Sylvester for their appearances in the film (though Joe Alaskey voiced Yosemite Sam in Blanc's place).[2]

Gallery

Autobiography

References

  1. ↑ DeMolay International. DeMolay Hall of Fame. Retrieved on 20 October 2014.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Mel Blanc, Philip Bashe (1988), That's Not All Folks, Warner Books. ISBN 0446512443
  3. ↑ Mel Blanc: From Anonymity To Offscreen Superstar (The advent of on-screen voice credits). Retrieved on 18 July 2017.
  4. ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeAM1vwEcFg
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