Mel Blanc Claimed This Was His Favorite Looney Tunes Character to Voice

Mel Blanc was the man of a thousand cartoon voices (okay, fine, he says it was more like 400), developing the distinctive vocal patterns of nearly every classic Looney Tunes character including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, Tweety Bird and Marvin the Martian. But when Blanc named his favorite Looney Tune to voice, none of those iconic animations made the cut. That honor, according to MeTV, went to Sylvester the Cat.

Why was Sylvester such a favorite? “He’s a great deal like Daffy: a perpetual fall guy with a near-identical voice,” Blanc explained. “Daffy’s is pitched up slightly, while Sylvester’s is recorded at regular speed and sounds the closest to my natural way of speaking. He’s always been the easiest character for me to play.”

Blanc developed the character’s voice after studying the initial artist renderings of the character. “When I was first shown the model sheet of Sylvester, with his floppy jowls and generally disheveled appearance, I said to Friz Freleng, ‘A big sloppy cat should have a big, shthloppy voice,’” he wrote in his autobiography, That’s All, Folks. “He should spray even more than Daffy.”

And spray he did. A Sylvester recording session often involved Blanc swabbing the spittle off his script pages. He jokingly warned June Foray, the voice of Tweety Bird’s owner, Granny, that she should wear a raincoat when they recorded the characters’ voices together.

Sylvester got a bum rap, according to Blanc. The character was often viewed as the villain thanks to his relentless pursuit of cute widdle Tweety Bird. But Sylvester was simply a starving cat doing what cats naturally do, he reasoned. And Tweety wasn’t nearly as innocent as audiences imagined, delighting in the cat’s painful failures. (And they were painful. According to Sylvester’s Wikipedia page, the character has “died” more often than any other Looney Tunes character — he bought the farm in at least 20 different cartoons.)

Blanc was also miffed that Tweety got top billing in cartoons when Sylvester and Tweety stories were clearly duo comedies in the mode of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello.

As for Sthylvester’s shthloppy catchphrase? “Keeping in mind Sylvester’s spluttering delivery, I wanted a phrase with two or more s’s in it,” he explained. “Since I already borrowed his voice for Daffy, I had no compunctions about nicking a line from another of my creations: traveling salesman Roscoe E. Wortle from radio’s The Judy Canova Show. The line, of course, was ‘thsufferin’ thsuccotash.’”

One of Blanc’s last cartoons, “I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat,” was released in 2011, more than 20 years after his death. The early exercise in 3D animation used a remastered Blanc track featuring Sylvester, recorded decades before the cartoon was created. 

“I remember when he made this song back in the early ‘50s, and it became such a hit,” Blanc’s son Noel told NPR. “And now it’s on film in 3-D ... it is just mind-boggling.”