PERSON
Mel Blanc
37 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
24 Interesting Facts About Mel Blanc
- #001
Shortly before his death, Time Warner executives (the owners of Warner Brothers) asked Mel Blanc whether there was anything they could give him — literally anything — to thank him for his life's work. He asked for a Ford Edsel, and he got one.
- #002
Originally, the sound of Jack Benny's Maxwell car on his radio program was a sound effect pre-recorded on a phonograph record. During a live broadcast, however, Blanc noticed that the record player was not started at the critical moment when the effect was supposed to play. He grabbed the microphone and improvised the sounds himself, to the great delight of the studio audience. From that moment on Benny made him part of the program and gave Blanc much larger roles on the show.
- #006
Blanc legally changed his surname from Blank to Blanc because a bad schoolteacher had made fun of him for it.
- #007
By voicing Daffy Duck from 1937 to 1989 — a span of 52 years — he holds the record for the longest time an original voice actor has portrayed an animated character.
- #008
Jack Benny once said of him, "There are only five real people in Hollywood. Everyone else is Mel Blanc."
- #009
In 1986, in a national poll of young people, he was chosen as one of the five people they most wanted to meet.
- #010
He only started at Warner Brothers after one of the studio's voice actors died.
- #012
He appeared in a television commercial for the American Express charge card, in which he rapidly voiced several characters in succession. After his death, American Express began rerunning the commercial again, showing his name with his birth and death years at the bottom of the screen at the end, both promoting its cards and paying tribute to his vocal genius.
- #013
Originally, voice artists were not given on-screen credit in animated cartoons. After producer Leon Schlesinger rejected his request for a raise, Blanc proposed as a compromise that his name be added to the credits as Vocal Characterization Specialist, and that the names of the other voice artists working on the cartoon be dropped. From that moment on he not only secured greater recognition for voice artists, but also helped raise his own public profile and quickly won him more work in radio.
- #014
He was open to people who knocked on his door asking for autographs, especially children. He used postcards kept by the front door. The cards featured the whole of Warner Bros.; the front showed cartoon characters and the back was blank.
- #016
On January 24, 1961, while most of the shows requiring his services — most importantly The Flintstones (1960) — were still in production, he was in a nearly fatal car accident. He performed his characters' voices both from his bed at home and from his hospital bed, in a full body cast, with all his Flintstones castmates and recording equipment gathered in the same room.
- #017
He had a collection of more than 300 antique clocks (as of 1979), including one from 1510 with only a single hand that chimed every hour.
- #018
In 1966, he received the French Order of Merit.
- #020
1961: He was the voice of Speedy Gonzalez on Pat Boone's hit album of the same name. Blanc actually improvised most of the dialogue, because the recording was Boone's version of a song that had been recorded by another artist earlier that year and in which the character had very little dialogue.
- #021
He was in the Masonic youth group DeMolay. Upon reaching adulthood, he joined the Masonic Lodge.
- #024
Blanc lived in Pacific Palisades on Toyopa Drive, next door to Walter Matthau and on the corner from William Schallert, who lived on Ramos Place.
- #025
His profile was written by Mel Simons (BearManor Media) in "Old-Time Radio Memories."
- #026
As a child he dove into a river with two other boys, and although Mel and one boy came back up for air, the third did not. Mel was kept at home for two weeks to think about what he had done. This was the only major mistake Mel Blanc made in his life, because as an adult he appeared to have no enemies.
- #027
He shared his first name and a voice booth time slot with his friend Mel Tormé.
- #028
On June 22, 1942, he played the boarder Tiffany Twiggs in the radio series "Major Hoople," which first aired on NBC's Blue Network. Based on Gene Ahern's comic strip "Our Boarding House," the radio series starred Arthur Q. Bryan as Major Hoople and Patsy Moran as the Major's wife Martha Hoople, who ran the boarding house (Bryan would later be the voice of Bugs Bunny's nemesis Elmer Fudd). The 30-minute program, broadcast Mondays at 7:00 p.m., was cancelled on April 26, 1943.
- #029
1925: He was accepted into DeMolay at the Sunnyside Chapter in Portland, Oregon.
- #032
He was known as the man of 1000 voices.
- #035
In the early 1960s, he made a new re-recording of the Road Runner's "beep-beep" sound to replace the old recordings Paul Julian had used for the cartoons, but it ultimately went unused since the Warner Bros. cartoon studio closed in 1963; the unused recordings were eventually used on the 1964 Greeting Card Record, on two LPs, The New Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1973) and More Adventures of Bugs Bunny (1974), for a beep in Bugs Bunny's Magic World, and in the Mel Blanc Voice Clock and the Looney Tunes Talking Character Wall Clock.
- #036
His professional relationship with Bea Benaderet was so close that in his autobiography he jokingly referred to Bea Benaderet as the "other woman" in his life.
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