Comedy (1946-47)

Mel Blanc voice is still heard around the world every day, thanks to the constant replay of the great Warner Brothers cartoons. Best known as the voice of Bugs Bunny, Blanc did a host of other cartoon characters as well.

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In radio, his talents were in high demand for characters and vocal sound effects, and he was on many shows in Old Time Radio, including Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Judy Canova Show, and especially the Jack Benny Show, where he was a regular for decades. On the Benny show, he played a car (Benny's fabled Maxwell), a railroad announcer (the famous Cu-ca-mongaroutine), the parrot Polly and the Little Mexican, Sy. "Si, Sy" and many other "soundeffects."

Mel got the chance to do his own show at the height of his Bugs and Benny stature, and the show sounds like it was made in the Benny mold. Mel plays himself as a young, somewhat innocent small town character, but because of Bugs, that really doesn't work as well as it did for Dennis Day, another Benny regular to did his own old time radio show. Mel makes Bugs sounds like a street-smart wise guy, so it's hard to forget Bugs when you're listening to Mel being an innocent nerd.

Of course, Blanc does many wacky voices on the show, one of which is Zookie, who is the assistant to "Mel" on the show. The "Mel" of the show runs a fix-it shop that allows for many strange and silly sounds in the shop, too. There's a romantic angle, with Mary Jane Croft playing Mel's girlfriend Betty Colby. Joe Kearns plays Betty's father as the gruff old man.

Kooky characters tend to show up often, and in all those funny sounding characters and objects, we have our most satisfying Mel Blanc. He was a one-of-kind actor, for in him, with a nod to Lon Chaney, we had the "man of a thousand voices."