7 Secrets About Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck From the Man Who’s Voiced Them for 35 Years
Second only to Mel Blanc himself, voice actor Jeff Bergman has voiced the most Looney Tunes characters over the longest stretch of time. He “officially” got the gig — the reason for those quotes will become clear below — in 1989 when Bugs, Daffy and the rest became teachers on Tiny Toon Adventures. He’s continued on through dozens of other projects like 1990’s Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, 2011’s The Looney Tunes Show, 2015’s New Looney Tunes and last year’s Tiny Toons Looniversity reboot.
While he’s not the only person who’s voiced these characters since Blanc’s passing, he’s been among the most consistent. Which, of course, has steeped him in all sorts of Looney Tunes lore, as well as allowed him to make some of his own. Lore such as…
Mel Blanc Was Supposed to Be in ‘Tiny Toons Adventures’
“It was a given that Mel was going to be in Tiny Toons and that he was going to do as many voices as he wanted to. But Mel passed away on July 10, 1989, which happened to be my 29th birthday,” recalls Bergman. “So Steven Spielberg is developing Tiny Toons, and suddenly, he has no Looney Tunes voices. Just two weeks after Mel’s death, I flew from Pittsburgh to Burbank, and I did my first auditions for Looney Tunes characters for Tiny Toons, where I ended up doing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester, Tweety and Foghorn Leghorn.”
Mel Blanc Just Missed Bugs’ 50th Birthday
“Mel passed away in 1989, and 1990 was the 50th anniversary of Bugs Bunny. He missed it by just six months,” explains Bergman. “For the anniversary, I did all the licensing and promotions and theme parks stuff as Bugs. I did the television shows and Bugs’ appearance at the Oscars. At the time, it felt strange to be doing it. I was like, ‘I’m a nobody,’ and I kept worrying how this was going to look for some 29-year-old to be doing all this when it was Mel who had done it all up until then. Finally, I just decided not to focus on anything other than doing the best job that I could do and trying to have as much fun with it as I could.”
He Is the Only Living Person to Play Both Bugs and Daffy Under the Direction of Legendary Looney Tunes Director Chuck Jones
“It was for the title sequence of Gremlins 2 in 1989,” Bergman says. “When I got the call for Gremlins 2, I was like, ‘Wow. That means Warner Bros. approved me, Steven Spielberg approved me, (Gremlins 2 director) Joe Dante approved me, but most special of all was that Chuck Jones approved me. I think I was so rattled because, before that, everyone I went in to have a session with, they weren’t the original creators. But with this, I went into it thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m not going to fool this guy. He spent years and thousands and thousands of hours with Mel Blanc.’
“It was a three- or four-hour recording session. Chuck Jones came in with a stack of storyboards that were five inches thick. When I walked in, the first thing I said was, ‘Mr. Jones, I want to thank you. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and I want you to know that I have done a lot of preparation. I’m going to try to do my best to capture, as close as I can, to what Mel would have done.’ Then he said something like, ‘Well, Mel just did what I told him to do.’ That put me at ease because he knew exactly what he wanted — he knew these characters better than anybody.”
Daffy Duck’s Post-Credit Scene in ‘Gremlins 2’ Was an Ad-Lib
“At the end of the Gremlins 2, Daffy peeks in on the side of the screen of the end credits, and he goes, ‘It’s over! Don’t you people have homes! Go home! Go home!’ That was all improvised between what Chuck Jones suggested and what I did. None of that was in the script,” says Bergman.
Before Mel Blanc Passed Away, Bergmen Secretly Recorded Part of a Commercial as Bugs
“People always try to guess what my first job was as these characters, and, in theory, Tiny Toons is my first,” says Bergman. “However, just recently, I released something nobody knows about. It was the very first time that I ever did Bugs Bunny, and it was either 1988 or early 1989. Mel was still alive and nobody was supposed to know.
“There was this video advertising merchandise from the Warner Bros. catalog. Mel had done both Bugs and Daffy for this spot, but the director was having some difficulty getting certain lines out of Mel. After all, he was 80 and he had emphysema, so it was tough. They had me come in to do some of Bugs and some of Daffy, switching back and forth between my performance and Mel’s. For the first time ever, I just recently released that and broke down which parts are me and which are Mel.”
He Re-Dubbed Classic Looney Tunes Shorts to Get on Warner Bros.’ Radar
Months before the secret recording session mentioned above, Bergman found an innovative way to get Warner Bros.’ attention. “I had submitted a tape to Warner Bros. sometime in 1988,” he explains. “It was a three-quarter-inch tape of some Looney Tunes shorts. On channel one, it was all the music with Mel’s performance; on channel two, it was just my voice sans any production — no music, no sound effects — so they could toggle back and forth and hear Mel and hear me. I did eight to ten different cartoons with me doing Bugs, Elmer, Foghorn, Daffy and Sylvester.
“They really liked what I had done, but they weren’t going to give me the job, not while Mel was alive and not until after they had done a big search after he died — and rightly so. But I was good enough to try me out, which is why I did that first commercial.”
Mel Blanc Had a Contingency Plan for His Death: His Son Noel
“I don’t think Warner Bros. ever wanted to think about the fact that Mel was going to die someday and that they’d have to find voices for all those characters. So I don’t think there was any real plan for anybody to take over,” says Bergman.
Blanc, however, did have a contingency plan, and he trained his son Noel to succeed him as many of the Looney Tunes characters. But taking over for his father wasn’t something Noel felt comfortable with, or even wanted. “I’m very close with Noel and he puts it this way: Noel felt comfortable doing Bugs or Daffy or Tweety with one or two lines — very, very short dialogue,” Bergman tells me. “He never wanted to be an actor — Noel was a good director — but he never wanted to let his father down, he just loved him so much.”
“My wife and I just saw Noel,” Bergman continues. “We went up to Big Bear, to this cabin that Mel built in 1945. Noel’s been going there for 78 years — he’s almost 86. Every time I see Noel, he says to me, ‘Jeff, can you do my father’s voice?’ Not a character’s voice, but his actual father’s voice. So I did Mel’s voice telling a story Mel told Johnny Carson. I said, ‘I did the voice of Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny was a tough little stinker, and I didn’t know which would be tougher — Brooklyn or the Bronx.’ Then I switched to the Bugs Bunny voice and said, ‘So I put the two of them together, Doc!’ Noel says it gives him the chills.”
