Mel was such a consummate method actor that it was said that when he was in a sound booth doing a character, one could tell exactly which character he was doing without hearing his lines.
Mel, who was raised in Portland, OR, became friends with the famous Big Band singer Kay St. Germain Wells who was born and raised in Portland.
Only got his start at Warner Brothers after one of their voice actors died.
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.
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.
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.
Profiled in "Old-Time Radio Memories" by Mel Simons (BearManor Media).
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.
Shared first name as well as voice booth time with friend Mel Tormé.
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.
Sylvester the Cat was modeled after Blanc's character Sylvester on CBS Radio's "The Judy Canova Show" during the early 1940s.
The sound Bugs makes while munching a carrot is actually Mel Blanc munching on a carrot. He tried using celery, raw potatoes, and a lot of other things, but only a carrot would make that carrot crunching sound. According to Noel Blanc, Mel's son, Mel was not in fact allergic to carrots as was previously thought by many. People who worked in the sound studios believed this because they would see Mel spitting out the carrot after taking a bite. Mel did this because he could not speak with the carrot in his mouth and that was the only reason he spat it out.
Was in the DeMolay, a Masonic youth group. When he reached the age of maturity, he joined the Masonic Lodge.
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.