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This is the final entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Bugs Bunny.

Other Notable Roles: Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Sylvester, Pepe LePew and hundreds of other characters in Warner Brothers cartoons; Woody Woodpecker (for a while), Barney Rubble, Mr. Spacely (on The Jetsons), Secret Squirrel, Captain Caveman and many, many more.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: Mel was a superstar of comedy and variety radio shows.  In addition to regular appearances with Jack Benny and Abbott & Costello, he appeared on dozens of other shows and even had his own program for a time.  He followed Jack Benny into television and appeared on other comedies, plus there were hundreds of commercials and talk show appearances.

Why He's On This List: Does anyone need an explanation?  He was the first superstar of cartoon voicing and the guy everyone else who went into the business wanted to emulate, career-wise.  And it wasn't just a matter of him being able to do a lot of different voices.  It had more to do with him being a great comic actor — the kind who could hold his own in a sketch with great comedians like Benny.

Fun Fact: At one point in the fifties, Mel did one line voicing a cartoon pig in a TV commercial for Paper Mate pens. The commercial ran hundreds if not thousands of times and Mel, who was paid for each usage, collected more money for it than he'd been paid for all the Warner Brothers cartoons he'd done to date. For years, he held the record for the highest payment ever received by an actor for performing one line.

It's two weeks until Thanksgiving and MeTV Toons has already been running Christmas specials.  This coming Saturday, they're offering up Yogi Bear's All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper, the third of three Yogi Bear Christmas shows that Hanna-Barbera made. The online MeTV Toons schedule says it's on at 5 PM but that may or may not be true for your time zone or source of cable. Lemme tell you a few interesting things about it…

The show aired for the first time on December 21, 1982. It was written by Yours Truly in July of that year and even before I got the job, the show was horribly behind schedule and there was a genuine fear that it could not be completed in time to air on that contracted date.  Joe Barbera called me in, described the crisis and asked me if I had any ideas for a half-hour special.  Many other writers had written scripts or outlines for it and all had been rejected somewhere along the food chain. In fact, the show was originally supposed to be done for Christmas of '81 but it was kicked over a year because they didn't have a workable script.

They hadn't come up with anything that could get through the approval process since then and it was now looking too late to get it done for 1982. Hanna-Barbera had proposed delaying it yet another year but CBS said no, it's now or never. So time was running out and all they had was the title that Mr. B — that's what most of us called him — had come up with when he'd first sold the network on doing a prime-time Yogi Christmas special.

I didn't have any idea for a Yogi Bear Christmas special but Mr. B and I brainstormed for a little while and I came up with something that he liked. I'm not sure if I realized it at the time but it was not unlike the plot of a Laurel & Hardy movie which, like all Laurel & Hardy movies, was irrevocably etched into my brain. But Joe liked it and I liked it and he phoned someone at CBS and pitched it over the phone to them. Mr. B was one of the greatest salespersons who ever lived — which is why his studio had the success it had — and they said yes.

He told me to go home and start typing like crazy. I basically had about three days. For an important network special that was re-introducing a great many Hanna-Barbera properties to a prime time audience, I should have had three weeks.

I have worked on few shows in my career that had as many fights and problems as this one. The biggest one — one of the nastiest battles I've ever had — came when an attorney in Business Affairs at the studio decided that Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi, was asking for too much money. This Biz Guy actually ordered the voice department to recast Yogi and all the other roles Daws was to perform in the show — Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw, Mr. Jinks, Hokey Wolf, Augie Doggie, Snooper and Blabber, Dixie the Mouse and Wally Gator.

So they not only wanted me to write the show in three days but this one guy there in a department which should have been called Non-Creative Affairs thought they could recast the voice of eleven of their established characters in a week or so. I wrote about that battle in this article a long time ago.

That article was about Daws — still one of the most wonderful and talented people I've encountered in my long journey through the comic book and television industries — so I didn't include some of the other problems we had on that special. Wanna hear about some of them? I had a feeling you would…

Well, first: We had a battle over what I would be paid and, of course, it involved that same guy in Hanna-Barbera Non-Creative Business Affairs. Joe Barbera was telling me I had to write the script as fast as humanly possible while this lawyer was stalling and making lowball offers. I think he thought that my sense of loyalty to the studio and Yogi would cause me to write all or most of the script before we'd settle on my fee. That, of course, would put me in a horrible negotiating position. My agent couldn't say "Mark won't write this script until you make us a better offer" if I'd already written the script.

That got settled with some bloodshed but that's a separate story, too long to include here.  And even after we'd settled on what I'd be paid and I'd finished the script and it had gone into production and everyone was happy with it, the Biz Affairs guy was trying to renegotiate the deal to which he'd agreed.

Everyone — including the folks at the network — approved the script with minor notes. I'm not sure if they really liked it or if at that point, they were so desperate that they'd okay anything but I made the minor changes and suddenly, we were in production, racing against the calendar.

Daws then recorded the voice track for the show along with a Who's Who of the best performers who'd worked on earlier Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Don Messick, Mel Blanc, Henry Corden, Allan Melvin, Janet Waldo, Hal Smith, John Stephenson and Jimmy Weldon. Jimmy Weldon was the voice of the little duck, Yakky Doodle, and I stuck the character in for a cameo and gave him only a line or two, then told the casting people they had to hire Jimmy Weldon. Amazingly, they did. (Weldon also played a few other parts in the show so they weren't paying him just for one or two lines.)

While the voices were being recorded, Bill Hanna assigned the script to an artist to storyboard. For those unfamiliar with the process, storyboarding means that the storyboarder draws out every shot in a format that looks like a horizontal comic book page with the dialogue written underneath each panel. This then becomes what everyone down the assembly line works with as they design scenes, animate scenes, time scenes, etc.

I went to this storyboard artist, introduced myself and told him that if he had any questions or problems to call me and I'd work with him to solve them. He said he would do that but whenever I later stopped by and asked to see what he'd done so far, he always said it wasn't ready for me to see. I never saw any of it before he turned it in to Bill Hanna, whereupon Bill Hanna made every last sound of pain and rage that you ever saw in one of his old Tom & Jerry cartoons.  There was, it turned out, a reason the artist hadn't shown any of it to me.

This storyboarder had a habit of rewriting scripts he was given to storyboard. When he finally turned the job in — and remember, everything on this cartoon was on a tight deadline — Mr. Hanna blew sky high. The artist had taken it upon himself to rewrite large chunks of the script. This was wrong for about eighty reasons but I'll just name a few. One was that the voices for the show had all been recorded and if they wanted to change the lines he'd changed, they'd have had to call back those voice actors, some of whom were highly-paid, and pay them again.

Another thing was that Hanna, Mr. B and the network had all approved the script he had changed. Even when you aren't battling an impossible deadline, you don't go back to the network — the folks who are paying for the show — and say, "Hey, remember that script you all approved? Well, we've changed a lot of it!"

The story was about a little girl who runs away from her father and hangs around Yogi for Christmas while everyone is frantically searching for her. The network folks had okayed this premise on the condition that I never use the word "kidnap" or any form of it and I didn't. But in the storyboard artist's rewrite, he'd used that word about twenty times and added in a scene where the police corner Yogi at gunpoint and are about to shoot him.

This was a Christmas special. It was airing a few days before Christmas. And this guy had, among other alterations, turned the finale into a Clint Eastwood movie with talking animals and someone talking about making Yogi into a rug in front of a fireplace.

Hanna and Barbera both read over his revision and both thought it was awful. Mr. B thought the guy had handed it in late intentionally, knowing how pressing the deadline was. The assumption was that he thought they'd be forced to use it as he'd done it. Instead, they fired the guy and Hanna had an interesting comment about the dismissed storyboard artist.  He said, "He won an Emmy once and ever since then, he's decided he knows more than anyone else, even guys like me who have several of them."

I don't know if the artist ever worked for Hanna-Barbera again. I do know he worked for other studios where he was dismissed for trying to rewrite scripts he was given. A few years later when I was doing Garfield and Friends — which was not an H-B show — he approached the producer and practically begged for work, promising he would not in any way try to rewrite the script. The producer gave him one I'd written, the artist went home and rewrote the script as he boarded it — again, a script that had already been approved by everyone and the voices had been recorded. He was dismissed and no one tried to fix this storyboard. It just went into the trash and they gave that script to another artist who started over. Maybe Bill Hanna was right about that Emmy.

Getting back to the Yogi Special which was about at DEFCON 2 status and climbing: Mr. Hanna called in Alex Lovy — said to be the fastest storyboard artist in the business — and he and a few other artists went to work on it.  In just a few days, they redid all the scenes that the first guy had changed.  The final board was a mess of notes and drawings that were practically stick figures and this all put the show in even greater deadline trouble.

It was being animated at a studio in Australia and the guys down under did triple overtime to get it done…and even then, several moments (including the last scene) were dropped out with Mr. Hanna's permission.  There just plain wasn't time, I was told, to do those scenes or even to fix some of the inevitable errors that always turn up in the first pass at animating a show.

In this case, the first pass was the only pass. The show arrived from Australia the day before it had to air and the editors worked all night on it, trying to fix mistakes and cover for the never-animated footage. I don't think anyone but the editors saw it before it went on the air…although someone at CBS did order the bleeping of a word uttered by Snagglepuss.

I've heard of cartoons being edited but this is the only time I know of a character being bleeped. It was bleeped when CBS ran it, it's bleeped on all the home video releases and I assume it'll be bleeped when MeTV Toons runs it this Saturday. It's in a speech right after the scene where Yogi and Boo Boo are in a phone booth. Snagglepuss says, "Seasons greetings…Happy Hanukkah, even!"

It was in the script when everyone approved it. They recorded Daws saying it. The animators animated to it. And then someone gave the order to delete the word "Hanukkah." And I thought us Jews were supposed to run show business.

As I said in the column to which I linked above, I was relatively happy with how it all came out but — and I'll quote myself here — the fact that my pride in everything I did for H-B had to be qualified with phrases like "given the circumstances," along with my discomfort at arguing with Mr. Barbera will all be featured prominently some day in an article entitled, "Why I Stopped Working For Hanna-Barbera." I didn't then intend to write such an article and was kidding when I said I would…but maybe I will one of these days.

Anyway, I'm not urging you to watch the special this Saturday but if you do, I thought you might enjoy some of the backstory on it. If you do watch, let me know if by some chance the word "Hanukkah" has miraculously reappeared. I'm betting it won't.

For a change, this is a YouTube video that I posted. The description of it reads: "This was a spontaneous (that is to say, unplanned) moment from the Sunday Cartoon Voices Panel at the 2023 Comic-Con International in San Diego. The panel consisted of five top voice actors — Anna Brisbin, Maurice LaMarche, Courtney Lin, Fred Tatasciore and Frank Todaro, with your host, Mark Evanier. It occurred when Mark realized that Maurice and Fred were both among the actors who have succeeded the great Mel Blanc in speaking for the character of Yosemite Sam."

From Jeremy Hall…

You mentioned the other day that you were once going to write an animated Mr. Magoo feature. Can you tell us anything about it? How did you get the job? I understand that it didn't go forward because the producer died but was anything done on it before that happened?

Taking the last part first: Not really. I wrote up a one-page "pitch" and…well, maybe I should tell the story from the start. I had a friend named Greg Burson who was a terrific cartoon voice actor. He was especially good at reproducing voices done by actors who had passed away. He did the voices of several of Mel Blanc's characters including Bugs Bunny, and several of Daws Butler's characters including Yogi Bear. After Jim Backus passed away, Greg did Magoo for some commercials and a few other projects.

Henry Saperstein, who owned (or at least controlled) Quincy Magoo, told Greg he was looking for an idea for a Magoo feature. As I understand it, he'd involved several writers and whatever they came up with did not enthuse Mr. Saperstein to the point of going forward with any of it. Greg suggested he meet with me.

The three of us had lunch one day at the Smoke House, a fine restaurant in Burbank across the street from the big movie studio sometimes known as Warner Brothers. More importantly, the restaurant was next door to an office building that held the U.P.A. studio — and therefore, Mr. Saperstein's office.

Quick aside: For a long time, whenever they were recording Magoo cartoons, they did it in those offices and it was the job of the voice director, Jerry Hausner, to take Mr. Backus to the bar at the Smoke House and fill him full of alcoholic beverages until Mr. Magoo "arrived." After the second or third drink, Hausner would reportedly ask Backus, "Is Magoo here yet?" And Backus would reportedly say something like, "He'll be here after one more Manhattan."

(Or whatever the drink was. I certainly hope he was drinking Old Fashioneds because, you know, what can happen to an Old Fashioned?)

Anyway: Greg, Mr. Saperstein and I had a non-alcoholic "get acquainted" lunch and then we hiked over to the U.P.A. offices and he showed me some of the things they had in work for the Nearsighted One. Finally, he asked me if I had an idea for a Magoo feature. I said, "Yes. You get the rights to remake Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and then I write a movie, which may or may not follow the original too closely, called Mr. Magoo Goes to Washington."

Mr. Saperstein did a "take" not unlike a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon ogling Red Riding Hood and said, "We'll do it, we'll do it!" Fastest sale I ever made — or it would have been if the project had ever gone forward. As I recall, he spent a few weeks dealing with whoever he had to deal with to get the rights to the Frank Capra movie. He also asked to read something I'd written so my agent sent him a script of mine and he called to say he liked it and would trust me to write the script.

At at one point, he called me to say his lawyers had told him that he might not have to purchase the rights. We could call it what I wanted to call it if we treated it as a parody of the classic movie and didn't use too much of its plot. I have no idea how legally-sound that might have been. His lawyers also talked to my agent and discussed a range of compensation for me which struck me as the low end of Acceptable.

In this business, you often find yourself accepting the low end of Acceptable but I don't think we ever got a written contract. I wrote up that one-page "pitch" for him, which I probably shouldn't have done without a firm deal, but that was all I wrote. There was never a decision as to how much of the plot of the movie I'd be able to use and I never heard what, if anything, he had worked out with whoever owned the original. I'm guessing nothing.

Saperstein called me from time to time to tell me he was working on the deal but the calls got farther and farther apart. It has been my experience — in TV, movies, comic books…just about everything I've ever done — that this often happens: They say yes, "We're definitely doing this" but then no one takes the steps necessary to make it happen. They may keep saying yes. No one may ever say no. But the project just fades away without anyone ever officially declaring it inert.

By the time I read that Mr. Saperstein had died, I had long since stopped thinking Quincy Magoo was ever going to get to Washington. This kind of thing happens so often that I long ago learned to not start celebrating when they say yes. Someone still has to take a firm step, usually one that involves writing a check. Even Magoo should be able to see that.

In this recent post, I wrote that Jay Ward's cartoon studio "…whipped up an unsold pilot for Super Chicken with Don Knotts in the title role and Louis Nye voicing his sidekick, Fred." This brought several queries wanting to know more about this cartoon and where it could be seen. Had any of those who wrote taken advantage of the search engine on this site, they could have found this from back when we were mourning the passing of Mr. Nye…

A voice track was recorded to try and sell Ward's idea but it was never animated. Actor Marvin Miller served as narrator, Knotts played Super Chicken and Nye voiced his faithful sidekick, Fred. Bill Scott and Mel Blanc (!) voiced some supporting characters. Ward and his business partners played the recording for potential sponsors and showed them storyboards and artwork but no one went for it. In 1965, Jay produced another Super Chicken pilot but this time, he cast Scott as Super Chicken and Paul Frees as Fred, and they ultimately did the roles when the series was picked up as an element of the 1967 Saturday morning series, George of the Jungle.

For what it's worth, I thought Super Chicken was the best thing on the George of the Jungle show, better even than George, and the best thing the Ward studio produced after the original Rocky & Bullwinkle series. It's a shame the property never had a show of its own.

This is the minute-and-a-half pilot/sales film that Hanna-Barbera produced in either late 1959 or early 1960 to try and sell a show called The Flagstones. This, of course, soon morphed into The Flintstones, a weekly series on ABC that was originally marketed more for adults — complete with a cigarette sponsor some of the time — than for kids.

Had it been for younger audiences, ABC would have programmed it for 7:30 PM, which is when "prime time" then began. Instead, it debuted at 8:30 on Friday evening, September 30, 1960 where it was a surprising hit. By this point, the recently-opened Hanna-Barbera studio had sold The Ruff and Reddy Show (NBC Saturday morning) and then Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw (both syndicated) but this was the series that really put them on the map.

Before anyone asks: It is said that the name was changed because in the Hi & Lois newspaper strip — by Mort Walker and Dik Browne, which debuted in 1954 — the family was named The Flagstones. And that may be true, though some question that reason.

The voice of Wilma was supplied by actress Jean Vander Pyl, who continued through the series and almost every other time Wilma Flintstone spoke until Ms. Vander Pyl left us. Betty Rubble was voiced in this pilot by June Foray, while Fred and Barney were both by Daws Butler, doing much the same voices he did as the mice in the Warner Brothers "Honeymousers" cartoons which aped the Honeymooners TV show starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney.

June and Daws did not go on to do the series — Daws reportedly because that might have made the show close enough to Mr. Gleason's series to prompt a lawsuit…a move which Gleason once said in an interview had been contemplated. Again, there might be more to the story than that. Daws did play Barney for a few episodes later on when Mel Blanc had his infamous, near-deadly auto accident. And Daws was certainly capable of inventing a voice for Fred which did not sound as much like Ralph Kramden.

Two decades later when I was working for H-B, I made a comment to Joe Barbera about how Barney Rubble had obviously been named as a sly way of saying "Carney Double." Mr. B, as most of us younger folks called him, did a "take" that would not have been out of place in a Tex Avery cartoon. He then swore to me that that had never occurred to anyone at the time and I was the first person he'd ever heard point that out. I still find that hard to believe.

But enough background. Here's the pilot/sales film in question…

My buddy Bob Bergen has been the voice of Porky Pig most of the times when Porky has appeared since the great Mel Blanc became the late Mel Blanc. He's also spoken for several of the other Warner Brothers characters and many other great animated personalities, plus his is the voice you hear on promos for the new MeTV Toons channel. Here are some golden moments with Mr. Pig as performed by Mr. Bergen…

Wanna hear Bob do some of his amazing vocal gymnastics in person? He and five other great toon voicers will be on the Saturday Cartoon Voices panel at Comic-Con this year. It's Saturday, July 27 at 1 PM in Room 6BCF, hosted by the guy who runs this blog. And if you're smart enough to get there earlier, you'll have a good seat for Quick Draw!, the fastest and funniest panel at Comic-Con. Same day, same room but it starts at 11:45 AM and usually fills up well before that.

In a recent post here, I mentioned Norman Maurer, a fascinating gent I had the honor of working with. Norman was a very fine comic book artist who among other work, wrote and drew the Three Stooges comic books for St. John's, a small but important publisher. He later went on to become a TV and movie producer…and most but not all of what he produced featured The Three Stooges. He also managed the trio and that connection makes a little more sense when you know that in 1947, he married Moe's daughter Joan.

Norman was responsible for the Stooges' later works. In 1960, he produced a TV pilot called Three Stooges Scrapbook which was a half-hour of them stooging around in both live-action material and an animated sequence. The pilot never sold but in '65, he exec-produced a syndicated show, The New Three Stooges which featured the Old Three Stooges. Well, "Curly" Joe DeRita was kinda new, having joined the troupe in late 1958 but Moe and Larry sure weren't new.

The 1965 series consisted of animated Stooge cartoons, wrapped-around by live-action intros and outros. The animation was done by Cambria Studios whereas the animated cartoon in Three Stooges Scrapbook was produced by a company called TV Spots. We'll get to them.

Three Stooges Scrapbook is one of those films that Stooges fans long to see. I have no idea if it's possible to view the entire show anywhere but the cartoon segment and its live-action intro and outro have surfaced…and no, I'm not going to embed it so you can watch it here. I'm instead posting this link to where you can watch it on YouTube.

It was put there by a YouTuber named Curly's Grandson who is apparently Curly's Grandson. Since he apparently spent good money to preserve and transfer the film, I want to give him every possible chance to monetize its presence on YouTube…ergo, a link but no embed here.

TV Spots was an animation studio that mainly did commercials. It was founded by Bob Wickersham, who among his many credits directed the first Fox & Crow cartoons for Columbia and also wrote and drew comic books — of the Fox and Crow for DC and some other creations for other companies. At some point, he was squeezed out of the company he started but before TV Spots closed down in (I think) the late sixties, it was involved in a number of TV shows you may have heard of including Crusader Rabbit, King Leonardo, Calvin and the Colonel and some occasional sub-contracting work for Jay Ward.

If you go watch the Stooges cartoon, you'll see Moe Howard, Larry Fine and "Curly" Joe DeRita intro it and provide their voices for the animation. I'm pretty sure the announcer in the cartoon was Don Lamond and all the other voices were done by Mel Blanc. The credits at the end are for the entire half-hour show.

Here's Mel Blanc on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for May 26, 1983.  Mel did a lot of interviews over the years in which he told not-quite-accurate stories about how the voices of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and others in that mob came to be.  They weren't exactly lies.  They were just stories that had been reconfigured to be shorter and funnier because that's what interviewers usually wanted.  And for a long time, there were no scholars of animation history to stand up and say, "No, that's not how that happened" or "No, Mel was not the first voice of Porky Pig."

But eventually, there were such scholars and Mel began to "true up" his anecdotes and what he says in this appearance is basically true…though obviously the part where Johnny asks him to do a Nazi Pig was planned and not improvised on the spot. And one of the best parts of this video is seeing Mel walk out under his own power. As you all know, he was in a near-death auto accident in 1961 — the kind where it was amazing he survived, let alone was able to walk again.

I met him on several occasions and even — and I can hardly believe this — directed him for a TV special in 1984, about thirteen months after this appearance with Johnny. He walked with a cane then at a very cautious, slow speed but he was a great enough showman to not appear on Carson's show that way. Johnny, of course, had zillions of people in his guest chair over the years. I suspect there will come a day on this planet where the only one of them whose work will still be enjoyed by whatever life form inhabits Earth will be Mel Blanc…

Here from a 1954 Jack Benny Program is a commercial for Lucky Strike cigarettes — with Mel Blanc and the Sportsmen Quartet…