![]() Finally my wife said to me, ‘You want to continue with the show or do you want to have a nervous breakdown?’ ” “They wouldn’t allow me to hire anybody else because they were too damn cheap,” he once said. In 1933, he married Estelle Rosenbaum, and soon after the couple began hosting a daily one-hour radio show in Portland called “Cobwebs and Nuts.” Since management would not spring to hire additional actors, Blanc invented an entire repertory company. An accomplished bassist, violinist and sousaphone player, Blanc played in the NBC Radio Orchestra and conducted the pit orchestra at the Orpheum Theatre in Portland. But for the first five years, he made his living with musical instruments rather than the magic of his vocal cords. So that’s the Woody Woodpecker laugh,” he once told an interviewer.īlanc, whose family moved to Portland, Ore., shortly after his birth, turned immediately to show business following his graduation from high school in 1927. “(In) high school, I used to laugh down the hall and hear the echo coming, you know. Melvin Jerome Blanc was born May 30, 1908, in San Francisco, where his parents managed a ladies’ ready-to-wear apparel business.Įven as a youngster, he displayed his one-of-a-kind vocal gift, regaling his classmates and teachers with the piercing laugh he would later develop into Woody Woodpecker’s signature call. In other words, he’s more or less of the suppressed desire of what men would like to do that don’t have guts enough to do.” “For the majority of us, the sassiness of our childhood, muttered alone in bed or nursed in sullen silence at the dinner table, had a secret champion in the voices of Mel Blanc,” wrote Times comedy columnist Lawrence Christon in 1984.īlanc, commenting on the personality of Bugs, put it in his own words: “He’s just a stinker. “So you see, I actually live these characters.”įor days following the head-on Sunset Boulevard collision, Blanc hovered near death.īut like his dynamic cartoon characters-who so often slammed into walls and shrugged their shoulders or were blasted by dynamite and proceeded to calmly wipe the gunpowder off their noggins-Blanc, after 21 days, finally awoke, picked himself up and went back to work.Īlthough his lines were primarily written by others, Blanc’s performances, like those of the Three Stooges and Marx Brothers, gave life and technicolor to a spirit of wise-aleckness in an era of gray flannel suits and proper manners. The doctor then said, “ ‘And Porky Pig! How are you feeling?’ and I said, ‘J-j-j-just fine, th-th-th-thanks.’ So one day he comes into my room, he gets an idea, and he says, ‘Hey, Bugs Bunny! How are you?’ And they say I answered back in Bugs’ voice. “They say that while I was unconscious, the doctor would come into my room each day and ask me how I was and, nothing.
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