The Strange Day When Bugs Bunny Saved the Life of Mel Blanc

Great tal­ents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invent­ed the form and then broke the mold when they were fin­ished with it.

One of the best mod­ern exam­ples of this vir­tu­os­i­ty is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bun­ny and near­ly all of the Looney Tunes car­toon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 char­ac­ters, was famous­ly hard-work­ing. At one point in his career, he scram­bled from stu­dio to stu­dio around Los Ange­les to work on 18 radio shows in one week.

As Mal­colm Glad­well likes to say, that kind of prac­tice leads to mas­tery. And, in Mel Blanc’s case, it may have saved his life.

Radio Lab, broad­cast over WNYC, recent­ly aired a piece about Blanc (lis­ten below) fea­tur­ing an inter­view with his son Noel Blanc, who is also a voice actor. Noel Blanc tells the sto­ry of a ter­ri­ble car acci­dent that bad­ly injured his father in 1961 as he was dri­ving home along Sun­set Boule­vard from a job in San Fran­cis­co. Mel Blanc, dri­ving an Aston Mar­tin, col­lid­ed with anoth­er car on Dead Man’s Curve. Blanc was almost killed and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s son and wife spent two weeks at his bed­side try­ing to revive him, but got no response.

One day, about 14 days after the acci­dent, one of Blanc’s neu­rol­o­gists walked into the room and tried some­thing com­plete­ly new. He went to Mel’s bed and asked, “Bugs Bun­ny, how are you doing today?”

There was a pause while peo­ple in the room just shook their heads. Then, in a weak voice, came the response any­one would rec­og­nize.

“Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?”

The doc­tor then asked Tweety if he was there too.

“I tot I taw a pud­dy tat,” was the reply.

It took sev­en more months in a body cast for Blanc to recov­er. He even voiced Bar­ney Rub­ble in the first episodes of The Flint­stones while lying in bed with a micro­phone dan­gling from above.

The Radio Lab piece includes excerpts from an episode of This is Your Life when Blanc’s doc­tor tried to explain how he revived his patient. “It seemed like Bugs Bun­ny was try­ing to save his life,” was all he could say.

Radio Lab fea­tures anoth­er neurologist’s opin­ion: Blanc was such a hard-work­ing pro­fes­sion­al that his char­ac­ters lived, pro­tect­ed from the brain injury, deep in his uncon­scious mind. The doctor’s ques­tion must have sound­ed like a director’s cue.

Essen­tial­ly, “Mr. Blanc, you’re on.”

And he was, until 1989. Lis­ten through to the end of the pod­cast. The end of Blanc’s life is as remark­able as his long career.

Below, we have added a relat­ed doc­u­men­tary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thou­sand Voic­es.

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site to see more of her work. Fol­low her on Twit­ter: @mskaterix.