Voice specialist from radio, movies and TV rarely seen by his widespread audience. On 1940s radio, for example, his voice supplied the sound effects for the comedian Jack Benny's antique "Maxwell" automobile's gasping and wheezing and struggling to crank up. More widely recognised as the voice of virtually every major character in the Warner Bros. cartoon pantheon, including Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety & Sylvester both, Yosemite Sam et al. Since Blanc's death, his son Noel Blanc has taken up some of his father's mantle.

His son, Noel Blanc, voiced many of the Warner Bros cartoon characters for a time shortly after Blanc's death. Was in a near-fatal car accident on January 24, 1961, while many of the productions that required his services, most importantly The Flintstones were still in production. He did the voices of his characters in both his home bed and his hospital bed, in a full body cast and with all his Flintstones co-stars and recording equipment crowded into the same room. 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, 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 programme from then on, and gave Blanc much larger parts to play in the show. Buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery in California. Shortly before his death, executives of Time-Warner (owners of Warner Bros.) asked him if there was anything, literally anything, that they could give him to thank him for his life's body of work. He asked for, and received, a Ford Edsel. 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", the doctors eventually led Mel out of his coma. He appeared in a television commercial for the American Express charge card, where he performed several character voices in quick succession. After his death, American Express began running the commercial again, showing his name with birth and death years on the bottom of the screen at the end of the commercial, both to promote their card, and pay tribute to the vocal genius. 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 in 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. Epitaph on headstone at his burial site in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood reads, "That's All Folks!" Blanc legally changed his last name from Blank to Blanc because of a nasty school teacher who used to make fun of it. "Sylvester the Cat" was modelled after Blanc's character "Sylvester" on CBS Radio's "The Judy Canova Show" during the early 1940s. During World War II, he provided the voice of Pvt. Snafu in training films for the soldiers. Interestingly enough, these training films were written by Theodor S. Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Created the voice of Walter Lantz's "Woody Woodpecker", whose laugh was a version of a laugh Blanc had been performing since high school. He only performed the voice in the first three Woody cartoons: Knock Knock; Woody Woodpecker and The Screwdriver, after which Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies producer Leon Schlesinger signed him to an exclusive contract. Lantz used Ben Hardaway to record Woody's dialogue for subsequent cartoons, but since no-one could properly imitate Blanc's laugh, a sound clip from Woody Woodpecker was edited into these later cartoons' soundtracks. In 1948, Blanc sued Lantz for using his voice in subsequent cartoons without compensation and settled with him out-of-court. 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 IS Sylvester's sans the slobbering. Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald S. Smith, pg. 54-55. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0816023387. Was initiated into DeMolay at the Sunnyside Chapter in Portland, Oregon, in 1925. Received the Legion of Honour in 1966. Was inducted into the DeMolay Hall of Fame on April 27th, 1987. In 1986, Blanc was selected by young people as one of the five individuals they would most like to meet. He was the voice of "Speedy Gonzalez" in the 1961 hit record "Speedy Gonzalez" by Pat Boone. Blanc actually ad-libbed most of his dialogue, as the record was Boone's version of a song recorded by another artist earlier that year, in which the "Speedy Gonzalez" character had very little dialogue. Only got his start at Warner Brothers after one of their voice actors died. Raised in Portland, Oregon, Blanc worked at KGW Radio as an announcer as one of the "Hoot Owls" in the mid-1930s where he specialised in comic voices. It took him a year and a half to land an audition with Leon Schlesinger's company at Warner Bros. where he began in 1937 on a per picture basis until 1941. Mel also worked for Walter Lantz, MGM, Columbia and even Walt Disney when Schlesinger hired him to an exclusive contract. According to his son Noel Blanc, of all the cartoon characters he voiced, the one that was the closest to his actual voice was "Sylvester the Cat", only without the lisp. Had a collection of over 300 antique watches (as of 1979) including a watch dating back to 1510 that only had 1 hand and chimed every hour. His license plate read "KMIT." A representative at the California Department of Motor Vehicles asked him if it stood for a radio station, since it's illegal to advertise on a plate. He replied, "No, that's actually an old Jewish expression, 'Know Me In Truth.'" What it actually stood for was "Kish Mir Im Tuchas," a Yiddish phrase meaning "Kiss my ass.".