Mel Blanc The Man of a Thousand Voices
“Bugs, what can you tell us about your accident?”
“I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
Weird sentence.
“...as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco.”
Very odd to say he was driving home along sunset drive from San Francisco almost 400 miles away.
Maybe he’s trying to say he’d driven down from SF and was almost home after the long drive.
Bugs Bunny could lead the fix in Washington politics. He cuts to the chase in one phrase most the time. Nothing upsets him. He carries a grudge on his terms. He redirects the hardship back to the source.
A life-long friend of mine who did Donald Duck voices almost as well as I did, wound up in a coma for three months, on his back, fed through tubes inserted in his stomach, unable to talk, or lift his arms, or do anything but follow you around with his eyes. I could talk to him and kind of imagined that he actually heard and knew what I was saying, but he really didn’t react.
Two or three times when I visited him, every so often, I talked to him like Donald Duck, and asked him if he could do the same. A few times, he kinda’ squirreled up the side of his mouth and actually made Donald Duck noises very briefly.
Not sure if I was connected with him or not, but I was so amazed and thrilled to hear him connecting with that noise, although I wondered if he was aware of anything else. He died after three months on his back from a stroke.
Joe Biden’s doctor:
“Mr. Magoo, you in there?”
He played a cab driver in a Beverly Hillbillies episode
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0522484/
Granny Learns to Drive
Season 2 | Episode 33
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Blanc
He was an amazing man with quite an interesting career.
I recently watched this video biography. If you have an hour sometime, it’s worth watching.
I saw Mel Blanc give a speech at an event at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (which awards the Oscars) in Beverly Hills, Calif. in 1981. When he introduced Blanc, the MC related the story of his accident and how he asked the doctor “what’s up, doc?” when he came to. Blanc soon had the audience laughing by telling, among other things, several funny Polish jokes. June Foray, who did the voice of Rocky the Squirrel and Natasha Fatale in the Bullwinkle cartoon series also appeared at the event.
Great story... smart doctor.
Simply amazing. He loved the characters he created so much, he refused to let them die.
Mel Blanc was amazing.
I saw him on Johnny Carson one night in the 70’s when he told a story of how Bugs Bunny got him out of a speeding ticket.
He got pulled over, handed the cop his license, and the cop said “THE Mel Blanc?” Mel said yes and gave him a little Bugs Bunny...
The cop handed him his license and told him to slow it down, and said he couldn’t give him a ticket...”My son would never forgive me if I wrote Bugs Bunny a ticket.”
I remember Mel on that show many times!
