Mel Blanc on Letterman, November 15, 1982

[Music] [Applause] most of us grew up with the voices of my first guest bugs bunny porky pig sylvester tweety pie daffy duck elmer fudd yosemite sam barney rubble are just a few of the cartoon voices that this man has immortalized it's a pleasure to welcome mr mel blanc what's up david uh that's a great sweater you have there oh thank you very much i like it too yeah uh now that's not your actual voice is it no i have a very deep voice do you uh viewer do you remember the first uh voice that you did yes i do i remember the first voice i did now that's your real voice right there this is my real voice yeah the first voice i ever did was this that was i don't remember it but that was the first voice um so aside from the the list of folks list of characters that we uh mentioned in the introduction uh what others have you been responsible for well there's a yosemite sam that's a real raucous cowboy and uh of course there's a pepe le pew he's the little french skunk he kissed the pussycat and uh foghorn i say pay attention david that fog home later that big rooster he talks like that you know you're looking for chickens you see that little house over there says d.o.g that's real chicken go get them boy uh now we we have some uh uh i guess some clips here of uh some of your work you know what it's going to be this kind of a montage yeah yeah there's a few of the characters that are in the picture okay all right we'll take a look at that and uh is there anything you need to explain to us before we look at it well just a bunch of nutty people that's all okay so this is uh no no not pew lap you peppy lep you is my name why can't we have a mouth like other cats i'll tell you what let's take a walk in the woods while our porous cools now where have i heard that before hey sir i represent the rambling house storybook company and come on in stranger we've been waiting for you and the penguins it says here comes from the south pole south pole oh i'm dying [Music] how do you go about creating a voice do you get a voice and then say draw something to go along with us or do they come to you and say they show me a picture of the character and then they say uh they show me a storyboard which shows what the character is going to do in the cartoon from this i have to create the voice like bugs i said it was a tough little stinker so i thought which is the toughest voice in this country the brooklyn or the bronx so on you put the two one together that's how i got the voicemail doc and porky they said was a uh timid little character so i went out to a pig farm and wallet around the pigs i wanted to be authentic and when i went back to the studio they kicked me out said go home and take a bath which i didn't want to come back they said i said if a pig could talk you talk with a grunt you know that's weird that parking uh now you've done 5 thousand voices is that possible no i've worked in five thousand different cartoons and uh actually i do about 400 different voices and uh in each dialect you can do many different voices yeah do you have any that there must be some that are similar in the 400 that you've done uh no there's they're not similar i mean you can recognize each each one differently like in one picture i show my college speeches there's all all italian like columbus discovers america along with bugs bunny in the columbus he talks it down here you see he talks in italian a dialect like it is in the box he talks said the world is she's around i think and various you can do different uh voices in different different dialects yeah all right we're going to uh pause here we got to uh go away for a you know a commercial and we'll be right back with mel blanc [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi there no blank is uh here now hunter thompson will be with us later in the half hour marjorie gross is also here tonight how long does it take to make a cartoon well uh to make a six and a half minute cartoon in full animation took 125 people nine months to make one single fully animated cartoon uh and even then it cost around fifty thousand dollars and today it would cost around a half a million but warner brothers still do only full animation now by full animation compared to what well compared to limited animation of the films you see today the cartoons are limited animation they draw maybe one in ten frames where warners draws every single frame and uh it's much cheaper drawing just one frame and having the mouth move a little bit in the background on a turntable that you see over and over again oh and also for uh for a television using cartoons they need them a lot more quickly than they could be produced in full animation i'm guessing and their full animation actually is uh what makes every every motion believable yeah and every uh synchronized lip movement equipped and incidentally they do the voice first and the cartoon after the voice is is done they draw to the voice most people don't know that yeah whatever what happens if you get a cold and you have to go to work does it does that uh goof things up it's going to say i kill myself no i i usually can talk over a cold but i try to keep away from it as much as i can yeah yeah how did you uh tell me about your relationship with jack benny how did that begin well uh jack finally found that i was the one doing the crazy voices in the cartoons and he called me in and asked me to do uh carmichael a bear that was eating the gas man down and he's guarding his vault and uh i said yes he said what would he sound like so it may be like this if you would you're next week for six months that's all i did was a growl of a bear finally i said to me you know mr penny i can also talk well jack fell down i told him yeah he said i'll have the writers write something in for you yeah yeah you did uh you were on the show a lot and it did many other noises and sounds and voices that's right he had a parrot there that couldn't talk and he asked me if i'd uh talk like a parrot i said right where did the cheap statement it's a chapstick and uh then uh he had a train caller at the depot uh train living on track fine for anaheim azusa in coop come on girl at one time uh they were supposed to be the sound of his uh maxwell he had a 1926 maxwell and uh the phonograph record that the sound effects men used uh had the motor sound on it and they'd hold their finger on it to make it go slow and stop well when it came to that queue i saw that they had forgot to put the electric plug into the socket and i jumped up to the microphone and i made like a a 1926 maxwell [Applause] [Music] what was the uh what was the character was his name psy she yeah and what was that character that was a cute character i came in with a sombrero on my head i saw rappy over my shoulder and a big bass violin and mr benny said uh you came all the way from tijuana to play in my band see and i see you brought your bass file in with you see what's your name say psy she can i see you brought a young lady with you is that your sister she uh what's her name sue sue she well what does she do for a living so that's all there was to the whole spot with jack younger uh we we have uh some more film now this would be a a new film a new cartoon feature length is that right i think no i think this is a gold rush this is a bugs bunny uh third motion picture and it's called uh a thousand and one bugs bunny nights or a thousand wild hair nights something like that and uh i haven't even seen the whole thing yet okay so this should be very good it's a new new picture oh this is a new picture this could be shown probably in theaters okay well yeah that'd be a good place to start uh all right uh 1001 what was it a thousand and one nights [Music] it's uh 1001 1001 rabbit tails rabbit tails just bugs bunnies third movie 1001 rabbit tails yeah all right and that will be out shortly huh yes very soon all right it's a pleasure meeting you thank you very much thank you very much ladies and gentlemen we'll go away here for station identification and uh we'll be right back with hunter and marjorie gross [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Don Giller

Views: 87,883

Keywords: Mel Blanc

Id: okX_ZU4B7Os

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019