One of my favorite records when I was a kid — and I still have that well-played copy — was a Golden Record called Bugs Bunny Songfest. Or at least, it was half a favorite record. It said on the front, "Original Cartoon Voices," which at age eleven or so, I took to mean it featured Mel Blanc…and, sure enough, around half of it did. On one side, you got twelve tracks, each with a Warner Brothers character singing a bouncy birthday song to all children born in one month. The January song was by Sylvester, the February song was from Tweety, Daffy Duck got my birth month of March, etc., and they were all — or almost all — performed by Mel Blanc, himself.
The one exception may have been April, which was assigned to Ollie Owl, an obscure WB character seen mostly in the Looney Tunescomic book. I didn't care about Ollie Owl, so I rarely played that cut…but I seem to recall it was not Mel. The rest though, were. If you'd like to hear an example, over at the Classic Cartoon Records website, they've posted a Real Audio file of Mr. Blanc as Foghorn Leghorn, singing his birthday wishes to all the kiddos born in November.
What's interesting — which is not to say any of it is good — is what's on the other side of Bugs Bunny Songfest. There, you get a whole bunch of songs by Bugs Bunny and Daffy and Elmer Fudd and all the other WB superstars…but these were not "original cartoon voices."They were not by Mel Blanc, a fact that was painfully obvious to me when, as I small tot, I first played my purchase. In fact, it was very frustrating. I loved the side that was Mel, hated the side that wasn't, and thought it was darned unfair that you couldn't return half a record album for a partial refund.
The early records based on the Warner Brothers characters were produced by Capitol Records in Hollywood, and they not only hired Mel to play his characters (and Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd, to play Elmer Fudd) but also engaged the studio's best writers to write the records, and studio artists to draw the album covers. In 1954, Capitol stopped producing new records and while they continued to repackage and reissue the old ones, the new ones were produced and released by Golden Records, a New York based partnership of Western Publishing Company and the Simon and Shuster publishing firm. Though they sometimes advertised "original cartoon voices" on their record jackets, the folks at Golden did not seem to think it worth the trouble or expense to engage the "real" voice of the WB characters. That may have been because Mel was 3,000 miles away but it was probably also because he charged a lot of money to do Bugs Bunny in any other venue than a Warner Brothers cartoon.
(Golden did at least two records where Bryan played Fudd and on one, Bugs was apparently played by Dave Barry, who was heard in a number of Warner Brothers cartoons doing supporting roles. I'm guessing these were recorded in New York. Bryan was bi-coastal, commuting often to Manhattan for TV and radio jobs, and Barry was a successful stand-up comedian, who often went East to play a night club or appear on Ed Sullivan's TV show. The one time I met Barry, he seemed quite certain that, after Bryan passed away, he played Elmer Fudd in at least one Bugs Bunny cartoon and one record. The Bugs cartoon appears to be Prehysterical Hare, which actually came out in 1958, a year before Bryan's death, but no one has ever identified the record…which, of course, may not have been released. You can read more about Mr. Barry in this obit I wrote for him in 2001.)
Over on the Classic Cartoon Records site, they note that the twelve birthday songs were the only things Blanc recorded for Golden, and they theorize they were done for a line called "Little Golden Record Chests," which were boxed sets of 78 or 45 RPM records, sometimes packaged in a decorative carrying case. The theory is that the folks at Golden hired Mel and recorded the tunes for a planned "chest," then changed their minds and stuck the material on the Bugs Bunny Songfest record. This may be so…but the birthday songs sound to me more like the kind of orchestrations and sound quality of the Capitol recordings. So I can't help but speculate that they were recorded for Capitol, Capitol decided not to release them…and somehow, Golden Records acquired the material.
In the meantime, others have been speculating on the identity of the luckless voice actor who had the impossible task of imitating Mel's characterizations for the Golden Records. On several animation message forums, the names of Daws Butler and Jerry Hausner have been suggested. I'm 100% certain it wasn't Daws. Doesn't sound anything like him, plus Daws was in Los Angeles then…and just as busy and expensive as Mel Blanc. I'm 98% certain it wasn't Hausner, who did briefly fill in as Bugs for some commercials and spots for the Bugs Bunny TV show when Mel was recuperating from his 1961 auto accident…and I don't think it was Dave Barry, either. It may have been Gil Mack, who was the main guy hired by Golden Records to imitate Daws for their Hanna-Barbera records. Mack was heard on a number of puppet and cartoon shows produced in New York in the fifties and sixties, and a lot — like Astro Boy and Gigantor — that were dubbed into English there. Or maybe it was someone else, or several someone elses, who've never been identified. If anyone reading this has a clue, let us know.