This is a commercial for an animation gallery but it's also four minutes of Mel Blanc telling how he created the voices of the classic Warner Brothers characters.
Well, actually, these are what I call the "talk show" versions of how those voices came to be, as opposed to the actual stories. Mel was a great self-promoter, and I don't mean that at all in a bad way. The man raised his craft to a high level and also a visible one, doing interviews and appearing on television to remind people that actors spoke for cartoon characters. With the possible exception of Jim Backus, Mel was the only "celebrity" known for that job in the forties, fifties and even into the sixties.
During that time, there was little or no scholarship about cartoons…no books wherein one could learn the history of the Warner Brothers studio, for instance, nor was there anyone else on the interview circuit talking about it. The nature of talk shows and interviews causes people who are asked the same questions over and over to develop short, funny responses that they repeat over and over, usually to the delight of interviewers and audiences. When Mel went on with Johnny Carson, what was expected of him was not a precise history of the development of Porky's voice. What was desired was a brief and humorous anecdote…so he developed one about deciding that a pig's grunt might be similar to a human stutter. For years, there was no one around to point out that Mel did not invent the idea of Porky stuttering; that Mel was the second voice of Porky Pig and that the first guy had given him a stuttering voice which Mel started by replicating and eventually making his own. (Porky's first voice was done by a man named Joe Dougherty. He was hired because he was an actual stutterer, meaning that the cartoon's directors and gag men were the ones who decided the pig should have a speech impediment.)
In the late sixties and since, there have been people around who've researched the history of the cartoons, and some of Mel's colleagues from those days also were getting interviewed…so Mel, being a smart guy, didn't push the "talk show" anecdotes in every venue. He recognized when he was in front of an audience that expected the real story and knew the difference, and there are some wonderful interviews around where he goes into great and accurate depth about how he did what he did. This is not one of those interviews but it's entertaining, anyway. Everything Mel did was entertaining…
