Mel Blanc on How He Created His Iconic Voices | Carson Tonight Show

I don't know if there is a person in the entire civilized world who has not heard Mel Blanc's voice he is probably the most famous voice in the world of entertainment he is celebrating his 50th anniversary in

show

business and his 75th birthday some of the

voices

by Bugs Bunny Daffy Duck Sylvester Tweety Bird Yosemite Sam Mel worked for years with Jack Benny on the radio Burns and Allen, all the best comedians on the radio, and has done the

voices

for a new animated film called Daffy's Fantastic Island which opens in New York on May 30. Could you be welcome please?

Mel Blanc, well, congratulations, happy birthday, hey, thank you very much right away. I guess any time someone bumps into you, the first thing they say is "do someone good, very good." A lot of people come up to me and say: aren't you someone? Yes, you have appeared. uh I guess in movies like in Parts, but it's basically been all voice cartoons, yeah, voices and cartoons, and uh, I was in a couple of short pictures, but I never had time for it, yeah, I remember the big ones Jack Benny

show

s. I've been doing speaking engagements on college tours, yes, I've spoken at 144 different colleges over the last few years and broke attendance records at all of them.

Children are fans of cartoons, they charge, yes, that's cool. What do they want to know? Do you want to learn? How to enter? Do you want to know how voices are made? So that's one of the things and everyone wants to know. I tell them how the voices were

created

correctly and they are very interested in it, then I showed it to them. Three Academy Award-winning cartoons, one is Nighty Night Bugs the Singing Sword and the other is Christopher Columbus and Bugs Bunny Discover America, and then the third is Pussycats, which is a takeoff from What's That Called? word uh Alcoholics Anonymous is called Birds Anonymous cats attached to each other cats not to eat birds have you ever discovered how many different characters or voices you have portrayed in your career?

Yeah, you know, when I had this accident, I was in the middle of a body cast and I wanted to find out how many different voices I could make I couldn't move I started early in the morning and fell asleep around midnight and passed the 400 mark. There could be 400 different voices you see with each dialect, right? you can do several different voices and I know pretty much all the dialects of course, take a Yiddish dialect for example, they're the guy that's talking here like that, that's the guy that's talking like that here and then of course there's the uh, He erases what I can't pronounce the words together, he says: do you like desserts?

There are my swords, don't you believe it? and then I met one, uh, a gay guy, he says, uh, I'll make you a very beautiful lamp, right? Worry about anything, remember everything, I'll take care of everything and then of course there's the guy who tried to get completely away from the Yiddish dialect and spoke like that, he's completely removed from the Yiddish dialect to see that. This is what you can do with each different dialect, different voices, how old were you when you realized you had this talent? I imagine you were probably a kid at school and then you made silly sounds to break everyone up at assemblies and the kids better enjoy it and laugh and the teachers would laugh too at that time, naturally they would get lousy grades.

I don't know why how you got into the cartoon business. I mean getting the voices right. I went to the guy who was on Cargo which was Schlesinger cartoons, right, and he was in charge of hiring voices and uh I said look, won't you give me an audition? Listen to me, he says no, sorry, we have all the voices we need, so I came back. For a couple of weeks I said, Won't you listen to me carefully? Sorry, we have all the voices we need. Well, I was as persistent as he was. I kept going back every two weeks to this guy for a year and a half and he gave me the same story, we have all the voices we need, finally this guy died.

I laughed too so I went to the next man on behalf of Church, it was Craig Brown, let's hear what you have and I auditioned for him, he said would you do it again? The directors said yes and they had fun. One of the directors said that I have a cartoon with a drunk Bowl. Drunk, do you think you can do the voice of a drunk bull? It was my first task. I said yes, I think. so he said how would it sound good, it would sound like it was a little bit it was a little bit stuffy and I was looking for the sour mash so he said he said great great what are you doing next Tuesday?

I wasn't doing the Damn, I said, I think that was my first voice in the cartoon, he's drunk, let's take a break, we'll come back and talk about a lot of other things with Mel, the only one I can do is that you used to play. on the Jack Benny show you played the car, the Maxwell, you played his teacher LeBlanc, his violin teacher, you played a parrot, all the other types of characters, can you still do the Maxwell boom? There is a famous story that I know is true or not about them. They had a horror story in English, right, yeah, they had guys, they had written a sketch, I guess, or something in the script and they, they came to Mountain, they say, can you make a horse name in English?

English horse women Quinny, an English horse Winnie, we were visiting Epsom. Downs in England, so they wrote Into The Script, can you do English or swim? And you said sure, so he came to the line and I gave him an English horse when he, oh, that's my favorite, um, when they say the voices like Bugs Bunny, they bring you the character and then you see the character and you solve the problem, You show me a still image of the characters and you show me your storyboard that tells what this character is going to do in the cartoon, right? and they said Bugs Bunny was a tough little stinker, so I had to make him tough.

I thought which is the toughest voice, whether it's Brooklyn or the Bronx, the right one for insects. Daffy Duck, well, he definitely is. Affordable crazy ducklings are always better than bugs and he says the bunny is. Despicable a drone man sitting here doing it, the train driver always in Southern California, now people in the rest of the country will hear those names of these cities and almost think they were made up until they came to California and discovered they existed. That's right, make some of that foreign, come on, what do you find? Have there been any challenges that you haven't been able to face over the years?

Have you been thrown? No, so far, they haven't. I am very lucky. like someone said they wrote in the script Mel Blank makes the sound of a goldfish, so I made a goldfish, he laughs close enough, okay, I'll throw you a crazy pig, a Nazi pig, we'll be right back.