Search Results for: mel blanc

Let's do two of these because the first one is short. A person who for some reason wanted his name withheld wrote to ask about a book in which my friend Harlan Ellison published his draft (not to be confused with the script they actually filmed) of the episode he wrote for the original Star Trek…

In the late 1990s, I considered buying a hardcover of The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay but I already owned Six Science Fiction Plays, the 1976 paperback that included the first publication of Ellison's original draft, so I passed. Today, I finally happened to read the long segment of Ellison's introductory material readable at Amazon's page for the Kindle edition of this book, and I see that he names you first in his "no particular order" list of the "soldiers and scavengers and hustlers and shotgun-riders who helped get this book into your hands." So in what way did you contribute?

What did I contribute? Absolutely nothing. I don't know why my name was in there — in first position of all places. I not only didn't aid the publication of that material in any way, to this day I have never seen that episode or read that script or even obtained a copy of that book it was in. I can admit that now that Harlan has left us.

I have a vague memory that Harlan realized he'd neglected to thank me for some contribution I made to a previous book of his…probably answering some research question he had when he decided, as he often did, that it was easier to phone Evanier than to get out of his chair and find the answer in some book. I think he tried to right that teensy wrong by thanking me in the next book he did.

But I contributed zero to that book. In this world, you're often not acknowledged for the things you do but that's partly offset by the times you get acknowledged for things you didn't do. I was also not a puppeteer on The Muppet Movie and it took me until just recently to convince the Internet Movie Database that I wasn't. They thought I was the one who was wrong.

Our main story tonight, as John Oliver would say, is this question from Chris Gumprich…

For cartoon voice recordings, are they usually done individually (one actor at a time) or in a group? I don't mean someone like Mel Blanc or Paul Frees who would be the only voice actor for an entire cartoon, but I've heard some cases where only one actor at a time records (such as Jason Alexander on Duckman) and others where the entire group records at once, like a radio show (The Simpsons is a good example).

Is there a standard? Is one way "better" than the other, or does it depend on the show?

First off, recording actors separately is called "recording in splits" and getting them all in the same room is called "ensemble." Is one better? I would guess that if you polled everyone in the voice business including actors and directors, you would find about a 95% preference for "ensemble" for TV show work. In some cases — and Jason Alexander on Duckman is as good an example as any — you feel some actor is so valuable to a series and so busy with other commitments that you have to record him when he's available and consume less of his time.

They do "splits" on most feature animation, partly because they employ so many otherwise-busy actors, partly because they usually want eighty takes of every line and partly because you're not going to do an 80-minute script in one session anyway. Tracks for features are often recorded over a long period since the film is produced over a long period. You bring Alec Baldwin in to record half his part and then you bring him back months later to record some more of his part including new lines that have been added or changed in the sections you did before with him.

Most actors prefer "ensemble" because they can feed off the energy of the other actors. For silly technical reasons, I once had to redo a scene with Stan Freberg and June Foray and I had to record them separately on different days. When June read her lines in the original session, she was responding to the lines as delivered by Stan. When she read them in the pick-up session, she was responding to those same lines as read by me. Stan was a great voice actor. I am a rotten voice actor. June was a pro and she gave a wonderful performance both ways but it was a tiny bit better when she was reacting to the great voice actor.

Also, getting everyone together in the same room is a lot more fun. If the director isn't a tyrant (as a few have been), it's almost like a party and the actors do better work when the atmosphere in the studio is supportive and not oppressive. And as a writer-director, I like hearing the actual exchanges because the way some actor reads Line 18 may cause me to change what another actor says in Line 19 or my idea of how Line 19 should be read. In such a situation, you can't change Line 19 if it was recorded before Line 18.

Quick story. One time, I voice-directed a cartoon with a prominent guest star actor who shall remain nameless. Let's just call him "Jeffrey Tambor." His agent said he could only spare an hour so I had to record his lines all at once, then record the rest of the cast after…so the rest of the cast just waited in the lobby, which is something you'll do a lot if you ever become a professional voice actor.

I finished recording this nameless actor in about 40 minutes and told Mr. Tambor he could go run off to do The Larry Sanders Show or wherever he had to be and it was then that he told me, "I don't have to be anywhere." I told him what his agent had said about him having another booking. He said his agent had fibbed and that he was looking forward to recording with other actors because he hadn't done that much before. The few times, he'd done animation voicing in the past, he was usually recorded in "splits."

So I brought the other actors in, we took it from the top and we didn't use any of the lines I'd recorded with him alone. He was fine doing it that way but even better working with the rest of the cast. Most actors are.

Actually, these days there are recording sessions done a third way…everyone's separate in their own studios but they're doing it simultaneously, connected via a video conference. Some shows started doing that before we all went into quarantine but there's a lot more of that now. Even after all this isolation is no longer necessary, that may become the dominant method of recording. We shall see.

Also: The Simpsons was ensemble when it started but I believe these days, some performers have moved outta-town or gotten busy so it's not as "ensemble" as it used to be.

And to bring this full circle, I once cast Harlan Ellison in an episode of the cartoon series, Mother Goose & Grimm. He played a magic mirror that sounded like an old Jewish insult comedian. I wrote it when I thought I could get Shecky Greene in to play the part but when it turned out I couldn't, Harlan was my next choice. He was probably better than Shecky would have been.

Here's our pal Bob Bergen again, now demonstrating how he might create a new voice for a new character. As I told you back in this message, Bob's great at simulating voices done in the past by Mel Blanc and others but he's also great at baking from scratch.

If you're interested in how one goes about getting a career like Bob's, ask yourself if you have a range like Bob's. There is room in the field for someone who only has one voice if it's a great one. It didn't hurt my dear friend Lorenzo Music. But I think you can see how if you were a producer looking to cast voices for a new show, it certainly wouldn't be a waste of your time to have Bob Bergen come in…and guys like Bob really can come up with ideas and new sounds this fast.

Bob will not at all mind me saying that there are a number of performers like him out there…guys 'n' gals who can do this. When I was casting and voice-directing The Garfield Show, our core cast consisted of Frank Welker (who played Garfield), Gregg Berger (who was Odie), Wally Wingert (Jon) and sometimes Jason Marsden (Nermal) or Audrey Wasilewsky (Arlene) and a few other recurring roles. All of these folks were and are that versatile and could play many other roles along with their main ones.

I did hire other actors (including Mr. Bergen) to guest in certain episodes, mostly for variety and to bring some different kinds of energy to the recording sessions. But I could have done the show forever with just a couple of those men and a couple of those ladies. When they did the classic Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, four people — Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees and William Conrad — did all the voices — and I mean all.

Here's my buddy Bob Bergen critiquing other folks attempting to do the cartoon voices he does, most of which are Bob channeling Mel Blanc.  We had Bob on The Garfield Show a couple times and he was quite good at inventing brand-new voices on demand, as well.  The thing to remember about Bob and someone like him who does "second generation" performances of pre-existing characters is that it's not about mimicry.  The good ones — the ones who do major characters — are actors first and impersonators second.

Bob is also one of the best teachers of his art, which is why his classes have waiting lists longer than the lines outside Costco to purchase toilet paper. You can see in this video how well he has mastered the art of saying something constructive and encouraging about performances of varying quality.

I wonder how many of those demonstrating their talents here are aspiring to actually someday get hired to do Porky or Tweety professionally or if they're just out to imitate the voices to amuse their friends and show-off. There's a big difference. I've met lots of folks who could do a great Bugs Bunny when all it meant was repeating a few lines they heard Mel do in some cartoon. That's fine but the guy they hire to do the wabbit professionally needs to be able to, first of all, do Bugs speaking lines that Mr. Blanc never uttered. My friend Greg Burson was Bugs for a while and he was called upon to do Bugs with an Irish accent, Bugs with a Swedish accent, Bugs with a German accent…

And also, a pro has to be able to sustain the voice over many hours at what could be a very long recording session. I'm really good at juggling three balls for around ten seconds…enough to entertain my friends, not enough to be a professional juggler.

If you're interested in getting into doing voices for animation, there's a lot to be learned from this video. You might also see if you can get into Bob's class one of these years. The wait is so long that by the time you're accepted, you may actually be able to leave your house…

The MeTV folks whipped up this little video tribute to one of my favorite (and much-missed) friends, the late Howard Morris. It's about all the voices that Howie supplied on The Flintstones — although I believe at least one that they think was Howie — the bird blowing up the balloons — was actually Mel Blanc.

I directed Howie for many years on Garfield and Friends and a few other shows. He was an amazing talent. If you made him do a line six times, he would give you six completely different interpretations. Sometimes, I'd give him no direction. I'd just let him do a speech over and over until he came up with something I liked and it was rarely something I (or anyone) could have coached him into doing. His talent as an actor was that organic and natural. He was hilarious off-camera or off-mike as well.

The Flintstones didn't use him to his full potential but as you watch this montage, note how he manages to make every line a little funnier and more colorful than what was on the script before him…

We're still thinking about Minnie Mouse and about the lovely Minnie-like actress who did her voice, Russi Taylor. Esteemed Disney historian Jim Korkis sent me this…

Like Mickey Mouse, Minnie only did squeaks and squawks provided by Walt Disney himself in the earliest cartoons. Marcellite Garner from the ink and paint department began doing Minnie's dialog in 1930. Thelma Boardman took over from approximately 1940-1942 followed by Ruth Clifford from around late 1942 to 1952. Russi Taylor became Minnie's official voice in 1986.

I am sure many people have shared Russi and Wayne stories with you. One of mine was that back in the 1990s when I worked at Walt Disney World, I got to be their unofficial tour guide and helped them do things like get V.I.P. viewing for the fireworks at Epcot. I joked to them that they could never get divorced because it would break the hearts of every Disney fan knowing Mickey and Minnie got divorced. Wayne took the offhand remark very seriously and started explaining in great detail why he could never divorce Russi because she was so important in his life. Russi, realizing it was just a joke, kept laughing and laughing. I still hear that joyful laugh decades later.

Russi did have a great laugh. Meanwhile, I got this from Jon Balogh…

It's disturbing to hear about all those voice artists lining up to get a crack at Russi Taylor's job. Could you advise on the ethics of such matters? I'm not a voice actor but I'm curious. When would it be okay to apply for that kind of job? What if the actor is still alive but just can't do the voice any longer?

If the actor who voices an established character dies, a potential replacement should wait a suitable interval — and no, I can't tell you what would make an interval suitable but I know it's more than a week or two — before even thinking about moving in on the role. I would think one should wait longer if the deceased actor originated the voice in question. Something like fifteen people have now been the voice of Bugs Bunny and no one's had the job exclusively like Mel Blanc did. If the current guy dies, it's not as big a deal.

If the actor is alive but the studio thinks he can no longer do the voice well, that's where it gets dicey. When Don Messick had the stroke that ended his acting career, he had his agent notify the studios than he was retiring and they should go ahead and recast Scooby Doo and other iconic parts he played. That is rare. Usually, the actor doesn't want to give up that important part of their lives and careers and admit they can't do it anymore. And sometimes, they don't agree that they can't.

June Foray wanted to keep working until the day she died. She was polite to a vast number of actresses who did their imitations of her for her, perhaps hoping she'd endorse them as her replacement…but she was privately pissed about every one of them. I don't think any voice actor really wants to hear that you can imitate them well, though most will be too polite to tell you that.

I was in the room one day when a noted voice actor decided for some silly reason to do his Bugs Bunny voice for Mel Blanc. At the time, Mel was getting paid very well every time Warner Brothers called on him to do Bugs — and deservedly so. The execs there used to weep and wail over what it cost to hire Mel and I thought that was petty and greedy of them. There were a number of people who were responsible for Bugs becoming a character worth billions and if Mel wasn't at the absolute top of that list, he was right behind whoever was.

Still, at least one of the WB suits talked to me like Mel was shamefully holding a gun to their heads. The exec was very well paid himself and used the old "it'll only take him twenty minutes" line to justify his resentment of Mel's asking price; no recognition that there was a special value to WB to have Mel Blanc voicing a Mel Blanc character. Even leaving aside the horrendous publicity that might have resulted, some good mimic doing Bugs was not — and still is not — the same thing as Mel friggin' Blanc doing Bugs.

So when that noted voice actor showed Mel he could do a great Bugs, Mel did not take it as the sincerest form of flattery. The guy might just as well have said, "Hey, Mel! One of these days, some dunce at WB will decide to save money and have me replace you!" Oddly enough, the noted voice actor in this story had been in Mel's position. He was holding out for a raise to do a famous character he voiced, they hired an imitator for less money and he was furious with that "scab" (as he called him) forever after.

Generally speaking, most good voice actors will tell you that you don't imitate another actor while he's still live and available. You just don't. If the reason they want you to do him is because they think he's just too old, that gets dicey and you have to really analyze and discuss the situation. Ideally, what should happen is that the studio should deal with that actor before they seek out a replacement; maybe pay him a fee, maybe find him other work which he can do.

If the reason is just that he wants a raise, you don't undercut him. It's that simple and most successful voice actors will tell you this. I know of at least three separate occasions where Actor A was offered serious money — in one instance, millions — to imitate and replace Actor B but Actor A said absolutely not.

In every case, the Actor A was working steadily and didn't need the dough. Still, there's a certain amount of integrity and decency involved in turning down a job worth six or even seven figures for reasons of principle and it is to be admired. By me, at least.

Ultimately, all this is one of the things agents are for. An actor who covets someone else's job will always (always) look like an asshole of some dimension for campaigning on their own. The way to avoid that is to have your agent contact the person who does the hiring and say, "Hey, I know one of these days, you may need a soundalike for Abercrombie Alligator. If and when that happens, I hope you'll read my client before you make a final decision."

That's how professionals do it. If you want that kind of job, professionalism is a great quality to display.

We're still talking about how cartoon voice actors get paid. Robert Forman just sent me this…

A few years back, over at Cartoon Research, they did an article on the cartoon "Windblown Hare" in which it was mentioned that Mel Blanc was paid $125.00 for his work on the cartoon. I found that amount to be absurdly low.

Checking the CPI calculator, that works out to about $1,500.00 in today's dollars which would mean that Mr. Blanc would receive about $30k in today's dollars for 20 cartoons in a year. So it doesn't seem that at least at the time a person could make any kind of a living doing that as a career. I assume even a guy like Blanc had to do a lot of hustling to make a living.

I note that today the people who voice The Simpsons make about as much money per episode as Blanc made in 10 years of Warner's cartoons. My question for you is was there a time when there was a major shift, and the voice actor business became something a person could earn a living doing? Or is The Simpsons just an outlier and it is still a hard way to make a living?

The Simpsons is an outlier in just about every aspect of show business. It will probably turn out to be the most financially successful thing ever done for television if it isn't already.

About Mel Blanc's pay: You need to remember that Mel Blanc was not "just" a professional cartoon voice actor. He was an actor who did many things (a few even on-camera) including radio shows, records, voiceovers for non-animated films, commercials, etc. As with many actors, a lot of the work was for industrial or regional projects the mass public never heard or saw.

In his last few years, he sometimes got big paychecks to voice some Bugs Bunny project — like, say, a series of commercials. That was because he was The Great and Famous Mel Blanc and there was a fear there'd be a mass public outcry (and maybe a negative reaction to the commercials) if they replaced him as the voice of Bugs. This enabled him and his also-shrewd son Noel to demand large amounts.

I told a story here about how I once directed Mel for a TV show where we paid him what I thought was a lot of money to record three or four lines as Bugs. I'm thinking it would be okay to tell you how much and please understand I'm not suggesting he wasn't worth every penny of it. But for about five minutes of work that he didn't even have to drive anywhere to do, Mel got ten thousand dollars.

For most of his career, playing Bugs Bunny was nowhere near his main source of cash. One of the reasons he asked for and got that screen credit that ticked-off his co-stars was that he felt the job wasn't paying him enough. He thought maybe having his name on the cartoons would lead to more job offers…and it did. He certainly made more money being on The Jack Benny Program or dozens of other radio shows.

For a decade or three there, Mel would run around all day from studio to studio doing a radio job here, a commercial there, then a record or an educational short or something else. All that stuff could add up to a pretty nice living. June Foray was doing the same kind of thing, often for the same employers. June would leave her home out in Woodland Hills each weekday morning at 7 AM and drive into Hollywood. Then she'd spend the day going from job to job…sometimes four or five in a day, sometimes into the evening. Even during the years she did Rocky & Bullwinkle, cartoons were never the majority of the bookings.

At one point in the fifties, Mel did the voices for an animated commercial for PaperMate pens that ran constantly on TV. It is said he made more money off that commercial than he had off all the cartoons he'd done by then put together.

It's the same today. Almost no one is exclusively a cartoon voice performer. The people you think of in that category also do commercials, video games, audio books, promos, dubbing, industrial films, announcing, etc. I have worked with several cartoon voice actors who also provide voices for like when you call a business and a recorded voice asks you, "How may I direct your call? If you know your party's extension, you may enter it now."

This is something a lot of aspiring cartoon voice actors don't get. Each year at Comic-Con — and this year will be no exception — I do a panel late Sunday afternoon called "The Business of Cartoon Voices." I bring in a top agent and a couple of actors and we dispense free advice to the wanna-bes…the kind of advice for which some less-than-honest "teachers" charge hefty fees.

Each year, at least a couple of the folks in the audience look amazed to hear that the actors whose careers they covet don't just spend all day voicing furry creatures and giant robots. But even if that's all they book, some (note the emphasis) can do fairly well if they get on a couple of series or get called often enough.

Can you make a good living that way? Absolutely. It depends on how much you work. There are thousands of people who fail. I'm fairly certain the Hollywood voiceover industry has never been more overcrowded with talent but there are people who work. Some walk out of a recording session with a couple thousand dollars for a morning's work and then have another session booked after lunch. They're the exceptions…but so was Mel Blanc.

As a follow-up to this post, Andy Rose wrote in to ask…

In addition to Ducky Nash, wasn't Mel Blanc on an exclusive contract to Warner Bros. for a while (at least for cartoons)? It was my understanding that was why Mel suddenly stopped playing Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz in 1941, and then doesn't appear to have done cartoons for anybody else except Warners until around 1960. Of course, Mel wasn't exactly on staff since he was busy with lots of other radio and TV work, but I assume WB had to at least pay him some sort of ongoing retainer for him to not work for anybody else.

By "on staff," we're referring to a situation where someone is paid by the week or the month; where the employer buys his or her time rather than to hire them for a specific job. As I understand it, Mel had an exclusive contract with Warners for animation. They paid him some amount higher than union scale and gave him that screen credit that annoyed some of the other actors in those cartoons. They may even have guaranteed him a certain number of recording sessions over a specified time period.

In exchange, Mel agreed to be exclusive to them in…well, I'm not sure if it was for short theatrical cartoons or all animation but that would have been spelled out in the contract. As we all know, Mel recorded a voice for Mr. Disney's Pinocchio though only a hiccup was used. I'm thinking though that was before his exclusive deal with WB. (I'm having lunch in a week or two with someone who would know and I'll find out.)

The point is that an exclusive deal to work a certain number of days for a certain amount is not the same thing as a staff job. Mel never had the latter, which is why he was free to work anywhere else at any time of any day so long as he worked Warners' needs into his schedule.

A friend who worked for Disney and didn't want his name mentioned wrote me that Clarence "Ducky" Nash may not have been the only voice actor Disney ever had on staff. My friend thinks Cliff Edwards, who was the voice of Jiminy Cricket, did for a time, also. But both these men might also fall into that category I mentioned — folks who did voices and other things for the studio.

There were storymen and animators and others on staff who occasionally would play a role or two in a cartoon. Nash and Edwards did a lot of P.R. work and appearances and someone else wrote me that "Ducky" even sometimes conducted studio tours on the lot for V.I.P. guests. I wonder if they ever thought of putting him at the switchboard and having Donald Duck answer the studio phone. I've talked to operators who were less intelligible.

Hank Gillette sends this question my way…

As someone who has cast actors for animated cartoons, maybe you have some insight on this: Why do the people at Warner Animation keep recasting the parts in the DC animated universe?

For example, if you had the choice, why would you cast anyone other than Kevin Conroy as Batman? Is it because Kevin Conroy is too expensive? Is it to keep Kevin Conroy from getting too expensive? Is it just to keep any one actor too identified with a character, the way Mel Blanc was?

Well, there can be a number of reasons starting with the fact that creative control of corporate-owned properties keeps getting passed around the firm and not everyone who is in charge of some project may see the character(s) in the same light as those in charge of a previous project. They want to put their personal stamp on this project and that may involve abandoning much of what their predecessors did.

Or to come at it from another angle, someone doing a new Batman film or show may not like what Kevin Conroy did. That's not my opinion but it could be someone's.

Not long ago, I was contacted by a producer who thought a deal was 99% set for him to helm a new cartoon series starring a very famous character. This was not a character controlled by Time-Warner but it was one as famous as some of theirs.

Now, as you know if you follow this site, when someone in Hollywood tells you a project is "99% set," that means it's maybe 10% set, maybe less. It might happen but it's more likely that it will not, at least for a while. But I met with the guy and it quickly became clear, because he said it pretty explicitly, that he was determined to do such a unique, renovated, different take on the character — simultaneously taking it back to its primal roots and far from everything that had ever been done with it before.

Everyone, he believed, would hail him as the character's savior and greatest custodian ever. I'm hearing now that it ain't gonna happen but if it had, he wouldn't have wanted anyone who ever voiced (or wrote or drew, etc.) the character involved in HIS version. He was new to the character so everyone else had to be.

And of course, sometimes actors become unavailable…or they want too much money. I don't know that Kevin Conroy has ever done either but he was just your example and you wanted to know about how come that happens a lot there. It certainly has with some actors.

Since the great Mr. Blanc left us, at least ten different actors have done the voice of Bugs Bunny. I think some of them are better than others, don't you? If you were put in charge of a Bugs Bunny project there, might you say, "No, I don't want that guy, I want this guy?" And you're right: They don't want anyone to ever be The Voice of some character the way Mel was. Even if that person doesn't demand more money, he or she is a temp.

Batman, like Bugs and all these characters, are viewed as corporate assets for all eternity. Whoever does their voices now is just the person doing them now. Personally, I think they make a mistake by changing the voices and other things about the characters as often as they do. It makes the characters more generic, less special. But that's the way characters are treated when eighty different people control them and those eighty can be replaced by eighty others next year.

For more on this, listen to or watch the episode of Stu's Show I appeared on last week with my pal Bob Bergen. Bob has been the voice of Porky Pig in most but not all of Porky's appearances for the last several decades. As new Porky projects come up, he is often asked to audition for them. They have hundreds of hours of recordings of him doing Porky but every so often, he has to satisfy someone new that he can sound like The Pig. That's the way the game is played. Like most games in this world, some rules may not make sense but you either play by them or you don't play.

You get a three-fer today. In 1954, for what I believe was his one and only record, "Big Jim" Buchanan sang a song called "Money" that was written by Ruby Raskin and the great Stan Freberg. Little is know of the mysterious, never-seen Buchanan except that he was obviously a fake name for Paul Frees. Have a listen and tell me that isn't Paul Frees…

Paul'sJim's version of the song was not a big hit and neither was a version of it recorded by Mel Blanc. A few more copies were sold of this version by Tex Williams…

A few other artists recorded it but not long after, the song was largely forgotten…though not by Jim Henson. He often had puppets performing it — either live or miming to the Paul Frees record — in his various appearances. Here it is…and that's Henson himself singing it. Years later on The Muppet Show, he would again sing it as his character, Dr. Teeth, but this is an earlier Muppet and is reportedly from The Mike Douglas Show for 7/21/66…

Ron Glasgow writes…

I've noticed that on a lot of animated pictures coming out these days which feature well-known actors doing the voice work, that the voices of the characters in those films are often quite different from the actors' natural speaking voices that we hear them use on talk shows and in live action films. Guys like Mel Blanc did all kinds of different voices for radio and animation as a matter of course, and some actors today can do a range of voices and accents when they're making recordings for audiobooks, etc. I get the distinct impression though that many actors' voices have been electronically/digitally altered after being recorded for use in animated films, the way that some producers or audio engineers use Auto-Tune to make recordings of singers sound a little better.

Does that happen during the production of The Garfield Show, and are you aware of it happening in other animated productions? Maybe that has always been the case and I just wasn't aware of it. I did figure out ‎Ross Bagdasarian's trick with Alvin and the Chipmunks when I was a kid by playing around with the speed of those records when I listened to them.

Voices in theatrical animation are often tweaked and futzed and sped and pitched a half-dozen different ways. Modern technology makes it so simple, it's almost irresistible.  Obviously, it's done to actors playing giant robots and space aliens but it's also done to folks playing normal human beings or aardvarks.

Altering voices is not a new thing. A lot of Mel Blanc's voices in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were sped, as was Woody Woodpecker's most of the time and others at still other studios. With Mel, they had this problem: They'd speed his Daffy Duck lines up X% but then when Mel made personal appearances or did his characters on live radio shows, he'd try to imitate the sped voices…and then when he went into the studio to record Daffy, he'd do him higher and faster and the engineers would find that X% was too much and they'd have to modify the numbers. Some of the engineers were not very good at this and when certain of Mel's voices didn't sound right, that was often the reason.

There's less tech-tampering with voices in TV animation but there's some.  Often, it's so subtle that the actors themselves don't realize their voices have been modified ever-so-slightly.

Quick story: When they did the Fantastic Four cartoon show for Saturday morning in 1978, my friend Frank Welker supplied the voice of a silly little robot named H.E.R.B.I.E.  Frank is one of those vocal magicians who can sound like anybody or anything.  He speaks for Transformers and fuzzy bunnies and makes the sounds of squeaky door hinges or cocker spaniels.  For H.E.R.B.I.E., he did a voice that sounded artificially-enhanced but wasn't…and then after he left, the engineers would trick it up a little more. No one had told that to Frank.

After the first four or five recording sessions, the director told Frank to re-read a certain line a little slower.  He said, "We need it clearer because we're filtering you to make you sound a little more robotic."  Frank said, "Really?  Could I hear what that sounds like?"

They played him a sample of how H.E.R.B.I.E. would sound in the finished shows, which of course were not finished yet.  Frank immediately began imitating that sound, giving them the filtered voice without the filter.  That's why the guy works all the time.

On The Garfield Show — for which Frank, by the way, had the title role — we did some fiddling when we needed a voice that sounded like a robot or a computer.  On the earlier series, Garfield and Friends, we had some recurring characters called the Buddy Bears who would sing and talk with sped-up voices…

Because people keep asking me about this: The speaking voices of the Buddy Bears were done by Thom Huge (who played Jon on that series), Gregg Berger (who played Odie on both series) and whatever other male happened to be in the room at the time. I did a few lines once as one of them. The late and lovely Lorenzo Music played Garfield then and we tried speeding his voice to play one of the Buddy Bears but found Lorenzo sounded like Lorenzo, no matter how much we sped him.

That was for the voices of the Buddy Bears when they spoke. When they sang, Thom Huge did all three voices. And yes, I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music…and if you watched that clip, I apologize that you'll have that tune running around in your head for the next eight days.

Don't worry. It goes away.

The only other times I recall us adjusting voices on either series were because I would sometimes hire veteran, older voice actors. The pitch and timing might be A bit on the low side but they still had the acting chops. I did one session once where three of my seven cast members were in wheelchairs.

One was the late Marvin Kaplan, who was then in his mid-eighties. Our ace engineer Andy Morris would push a few buttons and turn a few dials and, like a miracle, Marvin would sound exactly as he did in the sixties when he was the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat. We did a little of that with a few other actors, as well — Stan Freberg and Jack Riley, to name two. I wish more studios would try that instead of saying, "He's too old. Let's replace him with a younger guy!"

Nice obit for our friend Don Pitts in Variety.  I meant what I said in it: "Before the voice business exploded, everybody was with Don Pitts."  In the sixties, it seemed beneath the dignity of on-camera actors to do voiceover work, especially on cartoons.  Thus, folks like Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, June Foray, Paul Frees and Don Messick had a large share of the cartoon and commercial business to themselves.  If you needed a funny voice, you called Don Pitts and he had your guy or gal.  I can't believe anyone will ever dominate that marketplace like Don did…or be any better to his or her clients.

Don Pitts, who was once the most powerful agent in the Los Angeles voiceover business, has passed away. I can't tell you his exact age but 90 is a good guess. He did outlive his last two clients, Janet Waldo and June Foray. The photo above is from the mid-eighties — Don with another wonderful voice actress, Susan Silo.

Anyone who listened to radio in San Francisco may remember Don as a top-rated on-air personality, mostly on KGO and KYA. On this page, you can hear about twenty-one minutes of a broadcast he did around 1956.

Don started in radio in 1945 but in the sixties, he made a move to Los Angeles and into representing other folks in front of microphones. Nearly everyone in town who did voiceovers in the sixties and into the seventies was a Don Pitts client including June, Janet, Mel Blanc, Orson Welles, Casey Kasem, Paul Frees, Paul Winchell, Rod Roddy, Henry Corden, Don Messick and Daws Butler. That is a very partial list. He was a fine gentleman and even though I'm sick of writing about death this week, I had to note his passing.

Here's a little video essay about cartoon sound effects. It's good as far as it goes but it oddly omits one important source of noises in cartoons: Vocal sound effects performed by cartoon voice actors.

At the end of this video, there's a quick cut of Marvin the Martian playing a little tune on a trumpet.  That sound came out of the amazing mouth of Mr. Mel Blanc and it was heard in many Warner Brothers cartoons, as well as Mel's ability to sound like an old car chugging along or an old airplane or any of  a number of noises.  Other vocal performers like Frank Welker and Don Messick (and more recently, guys like Dee Bradley Baker) have given us sounds that have more personality than any non-organic source.

But this is still a pretty good little video.  Give it a look and listen…

I recorded my interview for Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast some time ago and I'm listening to it now. Why did I say that Allan Melvin was the voice of Droopalong on the Ricochet Rabbit cartoons? I know darned well that Mel Blanc was the voice of Droopalong on the Ricochet Rabbit cartoons.

My lawyer tells me I don't have to pay Ken Levine a royalty if I answer questions on a Friday. Here's a bunch of short ones, starting with the one from Joel O'Brien…

When a TV program is squeezed so much to allow the greatest possible number of commercials, the end credits will be run at breakneck speed and in microscopic size. Sometimes, the credits for the program just run are airing as the next program has already begun. I imagine it has something to do with legal agreements with the writers and producers? Please, Mark. Tell us what you know.

The new practice of rushing through credits as fast as possible is because of a belief that if you have long credits, then commercials, then the start of the next show, you create the ideal interval for viewers to pick up their remotes and see what's on other channels. To prevent that, networks rush the credits…but they can't rush the credits of workers in unions that have negotiated how their credits must be displayed. The folks in unions that haven't gotten that in their deals — and those in positions that aren't unionized — are stuck with however the producers choose to display their names…or not.

Next up is one from Jim Held…

You've been posting a few photos of voice actors at work including the late amazing June Foray. In all these photos there seems to be a big round flat sort of "filter" thingie between the actor and the microphone. I see the mikes also have padding around then I assume to kill the popping of sharp exhales. But what are the big round disk shaped things? More filters?

Yep. And in some cases, they're there to stop spittle from getting on the microphone. Some voices can be kind of moist. You should have seen Mel Blanc doing Sylvester. It was magical but in some ways, it was like having front row seats for a Gallagher performance. And Mel didn't even need a watermelon.

Next, here's one from Craig Buchman…

Are you sure you didn't start your blog sooner than 2000? I've lived in my current place since 1999 and could swear I had been reading your blog at my last place of residence. I seem to remember doing a search for comic books or such and found your blog way back in the day. I've read it regularly since. I really enjoy good writing.

I put up my first website, which was at www.evanier.com, on December 18, 2000. Actually, there was a website there for two weeks before that as I tinkered with the design but since the address hadn't been publicized, it got zero hits. On 12/18/2000, I finally declared it finished and went on a bunch of other sites to announce it…and the thing grew from there.

After a little while, I decided it was too self-promotional (and unfair to relatives with the same surname) to call it that and I set up www.newsfromme.com and relocated it there. But December of 2000 was my first online presence. And by the way, this post is #24,673 so we're creeping up on #25,000. Thanks, Craig.

Lastly, let's take one from a reader who signed his name as "Dennis W."…

Just finished reading DC's collection of the Silver Age Suicide Squad by Kanigher, Andru and Esposito. A question occurred to me that I am surprised I've never seen answered: Why did silver age DC comic stories have chapters?

For a long time, there was a belief that a comic was more commercial if it had a lot of stories in it. Editors would sometimes argue — and sales figures would suggest — that buyers preferred three 8-page stories to one 24-page story because they'd think, "Hey, if I buy this comic, I get three stories, whereas if I buy that comic, I get only one." But the evidence from the sales charts wasn't definitive and there were also sales reports and letters that indicated readers liked bigger stories with more characterization and the feeling of a "big" adventure.

Some of the best ideas the writers had couldn't be squished into eight or nine pages. And it was also easier to come up with one premise for a story than to think of three. That led to a trend towards longer, book-length stories.

But! The editors and execs couldn't completely disregard the data that suggested some readers preferred to get three stories instead of one. So, to kind of have it both ways, someone came up with the idea of making a book-length story look more like three stories by breaking it into three chapters. They did this for a while but eventually, the thinking evolved and sales figures indicated that book-length was jes' fine and there was no need to create the rhythm of the story ending and resuming twice in one issue. Thanks to everyone for their questions.