BLANC, MEL

born May 30, 1908, San Francisco, Calif., U.S. died July 10, 1989, Los Angeles, Calif. byname of Melvin Jerome Blanc American entertainer, who created more than 400 unique voices and much of the character of a number of popular radio, television, and motion-picture characters, including voices for the cartoon characters Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Tweety Pie, Sylvester the Cat, the French skunk Pep le Pew, and Bugs Bunny (noted for the catch phrase What's up, Doc?). Blanc was interested in music at an early age and became proficient on the bass, the violin, and the sousaphone. In 1933 he joined a daily radio program and used several voices to provide a cast for the show. After moving to Los Angeles, Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, a cartoon workshop that later developed Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Blanc's first Warner Brothers voice was that of a drunken bull in 1936. The following year he became the voices of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, and in 1940 Bugs Bunny (first named Happy Rabbit) made his debut. During more than 50 years in show business, Blanc provided voices for some 3,000 animated cartoons, and during the 1940s and '50s he was responsible for the voices of 90 percent of the Warner Brothers cartoon stable. In the 1960s he was coproducer of The Bugs Bunny Show, a Saturday morning television program featuring Looney Tunes characters, and he also provided the voices for Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone's pet dinosaur, Dino, on The Flintstones, the first animated situation comedy created for television. In 1988 he resurrected the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and others in his repertoire for the animation-live action film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. That same year his autobiography, That's Not All, Folks: My Life in the Golden Age of Cartoons and Radio, was published.