Nickname:	Mel Blanc / M. Mel Blanc / The Man of a Thousand Voices
Known for:	What's Opera, Doc?, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Duck Amuck
Birth name:	Melvin Jerome Blank
Birthday:	30 May 1908, San Francisco, California, USA

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Free Image Hosting - Upload your favorite celebrity pictures. His son Noel Blanc voiced many of the Warner Bros. cartoon characters for a time shortly after Blanc's death. Originally, the sound of the Maxwell car on Jack Benny's radio show was a pre-recorded sound effect on a phonograph record. During a live broadcast, however, Blanc noticed that the record player wasn't turned on for the crucial moment when the effect was supposed to play. He quickly grabbed the microphone and improvised the sounds himself, to the utter delight of the studio audience. Benny made it part of the program from then on and gave Blanc much larger parts to play in the show. While in a coma after a cataclysmic automobile accident, doctors unsuccessfully tried to get Mel to talk. Finally, a doctor, who was also a fan of his cartoon characters, asked Mel, "Bugs? Bugs Bunny? Are you there?" Mel responded, in Bugs Bunny's voice, "What's up, Doc?" After talking with several other characters, they eventually led Mel out of his coma. Originally, voice artists were not given screen credit on animated cartoons. After he was turned down for a raise by tight-fisted producer Leon Schlesinger, Blanc suggested they add his name as Vocal Characterizationist to the credits as a compromise and omitted the name of any other voice actor that worked on the cartoon. Not only did it give greater recognition to voice artists from then on, it helped to bring Blanc to the public eye and quickly brought him more work in radio. Blanc legally changed his last name from Blank to Blanc because of a nasty school teacher who used to make fun of it. During World War II, he provided the voice of Pvt. Snafu in training films for the soldiers. Interestingly enough, some of these training films were written by Theodor S. Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Many of the voices he did for Looney Tunes were sped up after being recorded. Examples are Tweety, Speedy Gonzales, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck. Porky's voice sounds a little like Bugs' voice before being sped, and Daffy's voice is Sylvester's voice sans the slobbering. 1925: Was initiated into DeMolay at the Sunnyside Chapter in Portland, OR. 4/27/87: Inducted into the DeMolay Hall of Fame. 1961: He was the voice of Speedy Gonzalez [sic] in the hit record of the same name by Pat Boone. Blanc actually ad-libbed most of his dialogue, since the record was Boone's version of a song recorded by another artist earlier that year, in which the character had very little dialogue. Raised in Portland, OR, he worked at KGW Radio as an announcer and as one of the Hoot Owls in the mid-1930s, where he specialized in comic voices. It took him a year and a half to land an audition with Leon Schlesinger's company, where he began in 1937 on a per-picture basis until 1941. He also worked for Walter Lantz, MGM, Columbia, and even Walt Disney until Schlesinger signed him to an exclusive contract. Had a collection of over 300 antique watches (as of 1979) including a watch dating back to 1510 that only had one hand and chimed every hour. Played boarder Tiffany Twiggs in the radio series "Major Hoople," which debuted on NBC's Blue Network on June 22, 1942. Based on Gene Ahern's comic strip "Our Boarding House," the radio series starred Arthur Q. Bryan as Major Hoople and Patsy Moran as the Major's wife, Martha Hoople, who ran the boarding house (Bryan would later become the voice of Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny's nemesis). The 30-minute program, which aired on Mondays at 7 pm, went off the air on April 26, 1943. Biography in "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives," Volume Two, 1986- 1990, pp. 112-113. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999. Jack Benny once said of him, "There are only five real people in Hollywood. Everybody else is Mel Blanc.". Shared first name as well as voice booth time with friend Mel Tormé. He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Radio at 6385 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

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