This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

Nearly a century after they first appeared, the Looney Tunes are back in an all-new series. To bring this iconic franchise into the present, the creators are looking to its past, taking it back to the look and feel of the 1940s. But filling the shoes of legendary voice actor Mel Blanc is easier said than done. Featuring voice actors Eric Bauza and Jeff Bergman, and showrunner Pete Browngardt.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

For Better or Worse by Martin Landstrom
Tricks and Treats by Raymond Grouse
Charmed Encounter by Arthur Benson
Whimsically Wonderful by Arthur Benson
Playful Mischief by Josef Falkenskold
Under the Microscope by Josef Falkenskold
Tickle by Josef Falkenskold
Did I Make You Wait? by Staffan Carlén
Eggs & Powder by Muffuletta
The Zeppelin by Aeronaut
Covered in Love (instrumental) by Kylie Odetta

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

Way back in the early days of cinema, movie theaters would often play animated shorts before the film. This is actually how audiences were first introduced to Disney characters, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Another studio in town, called Warner Brothers jumped on this bandwagon in 1930 with a series called Looney Tunes. It was an immediate hit, and that success continued all the way into the fifties, when Looney Tunes started to appear on television.

By this point, Looney Tunes had developed lots of it’s most lovable characters—Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Marvin the Martian, Yosemite Sam, and the list goes on and on.

[music out]

Amazingly, back then - almost all of these voices were performed by one single person: Mel Blanc. And over the span of his career, Mel was the voice of nearly 400 different characters. Here are just a few...

[SFX Clip: montage of Mel Blanc characters]

When Mel Blanc passed away in 1989, a new generation of voice actors took over these beloved characters. They found out pretty quickly that no single performer could do all of the voices that Mel Blanc did, so these roles got split among various actors.

Including Mel Blanc, there have been 6 main voice actors for Bugs Bunny. The first person after Mel was Jeff Bergman.

[SFX Clip: Bugs bunny: Ehh, Warner Brothers paid me to say that.]

Then came Greg Burson.

[SFX Clip: bugs: Does your mother know you’re out this late?]

In Space Jam, Bugs was voiced by Billy West.

[SFX Clip: Bugs bunny: You were expecting maybe the easter bunny?]

In the 2000s, Joe Alaskey was the main voice of Bugs.

[SFX Clip: Lady, if you don’t find a rabbit with lipstick amusing, you and I have nothing to say to each other.]

[music in]

Then, in 2020, Warner Brothers rebooted Looney Tunes with a new cast of voice actors.

Eric: "Mehh, What's up, Doc?"

That’s Eric Bauza, who now plays Bugs Bunny. He also plays Daffy Duck.

Eric: Please pass the ketchup! I think I’ll go to bed!

And Marvin the Martian…

Eric: I'm just a cute little alien with a tutu.

And Tweety Bird…

Eric: Oh! I thought I saw a pussy cat!

And the Road Runner, The Dodo, and Barnyard Dawg. For Eric, Looney Tunes has been a lifelong obsession.

Eric: I am a fan first, always. I grew up watching these guys…

Eric: There's a picture of me in my eighth grade graduation. I had this Bugs Bunny button up dress shirt. It was purple and it had his heads all over it, and carrots all over it. It was the most hideous garment. I wore that on a picture day in the eighth grade. People were like, "Why are you wearing a pajama top for picture day?" I'm like, "No, no, no. This is an adult t-shirt, because it has buttons on it.”

But Eric wasn’t just wearing the clothes – he was also imitating the voices. He’d sit at home for hours practicing different cartoon characters.

Eric: The dents in my couch are proof that that’s just how I studied. I was in front of the TV. Ask my parents. They were like, "You ever play basketball outside, for real, and not through the magic of Space Jam?"

At school, Eric would perform these voices for his friends. Soon enough, he realised he was pretty good at it.

Eric: I would do morning announcements. I would do imitations of Beavis and Butthead and Homer Simpson, "Today, in the cafeteria we got meatballs. That's the special." "This Friday, you get to wear like no uniform. You can wear like regular clothes." "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Cool." and people would be like, "That's amazing. Can you impersonate that teacher?" And then that's when I'd get trouble.

[music out]

In college, Eric’s professor suggested that he try something other than voice acting. But Eric ignored their advice, and doubled down on his passion. One of his first jobs in the industry was working as an animator, while moonlighting as a voice actor.

Eric: It was like being a superhero. By day, an average animator. By night, an aspiring voice over artist. So it was kind of like, do a day job, a nine to five, but then network, make friends, and meet the right people. Boy, did I meet the right people.

[music in]

Over the years, Eric started landing more and more voice acting gigs. In 2011, he was cast as Marvin the Martian in the Looney Tunes Show.

[SFX Clip: Looney Tunes Show] Marvin: I’m dependable, hard working and a team player.

After that came characters like DiamondHead in the Cartoon Network show Ben 10.

[SFX Clip: Ben 10: Hey, be careful, do you know how dangerous this engine core thingy is?]

He was the voice of Luke Skywalker in Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles.

[SFX Clip: Yoda Chronicles: The Holochrons are worth more to you than they are to us. Destroy them, I dare you.]

He even had a small role in the pilot episode of Rick and Morty.

[SFX Clip: Rick and Morty: Ok, next through. Except you – you go over there.]

Then, he landed the job he’d always dreamed of: doing the voices of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in the newest version of Looney Tunes. All of those hours of goofing off as a kid had finally paid off.

Eric: Again, it was Looney Tunes Saturday mornings. It was sitting in front of the couch as a kid going, "What's up Doc?" And not really being able to do the voices, but still thinking I could do it.

Eric: But the fact of the matter is, it just kind of came into fruition.

[music out]

The new Looney Tunes show is called “Looney Tunes Cartoons.” But this isn’t just any old reboot. Instead, the show has gone back to its roots, recreating the classic look and feel of the 1940s.

Pete: We started dissecting the classic Looney Tunes and going, it's usually a clever, relatable setup, then you've got about four set pieces of jokes.

That’s Pete Browngardt.

Pete: I'm the executive producer of Looney Tunes Cartoons for Warner Brothers Animation.

[music in]

Like Eric, Pete has been a Looney Tunes fan since he was a kid.

Pete: I got introduced to Looney Tunes at a really young age.

Peter: I have two older brothers that had an interest in filmmaking and animation as teenagers, so they showed me a lot of the classic shorts. I would say I was probably around the age of six or seven, and I was captivated by it.

Pete: They're hilarious, they're inventive, they're basically some of the greatest pinnacles of comedy ever created by humans on planet Earth. I've heard interviews with Jerry Seinfeld, Conan O'Brien, all these huge comedians of our day, citing that as a reference, as learning comedy and entertainment through Looney Tunes.

Here’s a clip from Seinfeld.

[music out + clip: seinfeld Woman: You think I laugh like Elmer Fudd sitting on a juicer?

Jerry Seinfeld: First of all, Elmer Fudd is one of the most beloved internationally known cartoon characters of all time! “I’m gonna kill that crazy rabbit, hahaha.” Come on!]

Before Pete relaunched Looney Tunes, he worked on a bunch of other animated shows. He was the creator of the Cartoon Network show Uncle Grandpa, which Eric Bauza also worked on.

Here’s Eric in the role of Belly Bag.

[SFX Clip: I’m Uncle Grandpa’s magic Bellybag, so this is where I keep all of Uncle Grandpa’s important documents and stuff.]

After that show ended, Pete wasn’t sure what to do next. Then one day, he took a lunch meeting with someone from Warner Brothers Animation.

Pete: We were walking out of the restaurant into the parking lot, and out of the blue… I just turned around and I go, "Hey, if you ever want somebody to direct a Looney Tunes short, I would love to, because I love Looney Tunes and I think I could do something with it pretty cool,"

Pete: And she goes, "That's funny you should say that, because… we're going to be putting a lot into Looney Tunes in the next few years. You should come meet Sam Register, the president of Warner Brothers Animation.”

Pete: In that meeting, I just said, "I would bring it back to its roots. I would go more of a '40s style…” I didn't show them a drawing, didn't show them a sketch, just all by word of mouth. Sam goes, "When can you start?"

[music in]

Pete knew that he wanted this new version of Looney Tunes to be as close as possible to how it felt back in the 1940s, right down to Bugs wearing yellow gloves. But he wasn’t sure which voice actors would be the best fit.

Pete: I came into it where the attitude is, “I'm starting from the ground on every part of the process. I'm not going to just inherit people because they've done the voices for a hundred years. We did an open casting call. We said, "We're looking for the voice of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and Tweety Bird and Sylvester and Daffy Duck, Porky Pig. Everything."

Soon enough, Pete realized that there are only a few people in the world who can really pull off those characters.

Pete: We came to realize that the people who had been doing it kind of do it the best.

[music out]

Several of these roles went to the same people who had been doing them since the 90s. But, for Bugs and Daffy, Pete hired his old colleague, Eric Bauza.

Pete: I heard him do the voices, and I knew he could do the era of voices, the energy and the style that Mel Blanc was sort of doing at that mid-40s Looney Tunes stuff.

Eric: Of course, we established the nasally, the nasally New York stuff. But then there's still that bassiness and grit of his normal voice. Then all I could think of was, "Okay, I'm ready to record these Looney Tunes shorts." You know, this was 1940. What, was he smoking an unfiltered cigarette inside, wearing a three piece wool suit in California, drinking probably whiskey at 11:00 a.m. or something, asbestos in the ceiling?

Eric: So he had this natural kind of warmth and bass to his voice, and when you take something like that it's really hard to escape that. Luckily I can kind of bring that part of the voice. It was always that low grit in Bugs' voice that just made me want to eat carrots.

For Eric, stepping into Mel Blanc’s shoes wasn’t easy.

Eric: With Bugs Bunny, the acting that Mel Blanc left behind was so specific... Everyone knows this character like they know a relative. It's extremely hard and a lot of pressure.

Eric: As a performer, you're kind of scared to do the crazy things that Mel Blanc did that took him out of the voice, like the scenes where "Bugs Bunny was kind of talking like this and then “Oh! I'm dying!" You know? That stuff, that is not even Bugs. That is just pure Mel.

Pete: In the early Mel Blanc stuff, he wasn't afraid to go outside of the voice for a performance, and for comedy, so Eric does that a lot, and we directed him to do that a lot. So, if it's funnier for him to yell like a big angry man,

[SFX Clip: Looney Tunes Cartoons] Bugs: Meee!? That’s quite the predicament.

Pete: It's just better for the joke or better for the situation.

Beyond the retro look and sound, Pete also wanted Looney Tunes to go back to its original structure. In the early cartoons, they’d usually only have two characters on screen at once. But over the years, that started to change.

Pete: What happened with Looney Tunes is that Warner Brothers started thinking that the Looney Tunes should all live together and they should always be together, and all Looney Tunes characters should interact with each other... and that's not how Looney Tunes is designed. Looney Tunes is designed as comedy archetypes pitted against each other for laughs. So, they purposely never put certain characters together in the classic shorts.

So Pete and his team went back to the original idea of simplifying the character interactions. So in a scene, you may only have Elmer versus Bugs.

[SFX Clip: Bugs: You know what Doc? I think I can help you.

Elmer: Help me what?

Bugs: Regrow your hair!

Elmer: Oh sure rabbit, why don’t you show me after I eat you!]

In another scene, you may only have Porky versus Daffy.

[SFX Clip: Porky: Sir, sir, I need you to be quiet and p-p-please take your laundry down or I’ll have to ask you to get out. Daffy: And just where am I supposed to wash my dirty laundry – the post office?]

Or, Bugs versus Yosemite Sam.

[SFX Clip: Bugs: Arm wrestling? Hehe. No thanks Doc, I just want a drink.

Yosemite Sam: Well you’re drinking a tall frosty glass of arm wrestling!]

Structuring the show this way means the actors get to do a lot of improvising.

[music in]

Eric: We get to add things, and embellish, and go, "Well, maybe Bugs would say it like this." Or, "This is how comfy I think it would be this way."

Eric can also hone in on the parts of Bugs Bunny that he finds the funniest.

Eric: When I'm listening to Bugs, nothing makes me laugh more is when he sings. "What a debut on a rainy night in Rio! Ring a ding dink. What do they do when there ain't no starry sky?" The thing about Mel, is that he was an amazing singer, right? Those moments where he comes out of the bath and he's not supposed to be in Elmer's mansion and he's like, "La la la! La la la!" And he's tuning the piano and tuning himself. It's off key, but it's off key on purpose because that's how good and in control Mel was of his own vocal cords. He can sound off key and it'll still sound good and still sound funny.

In order to achieve the old school vibe that everyone was going for, they decided to approach the recording sessions like they did in the earliest days of animation. That’s coming up—along with another crucial cast member—after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

When Looney Tunes debuted in the early 1930’s, Warner Brothers had no idea how iconic these characters would become. For decades, most of these roles were voiced by a single person: legendary voice actor Mel Blanc. But while Mel passed away in 1989, the characters have lived on. They’ve been in movies…

[SFX Clip: Back in Action trailer: Brendan Frasier. Jenna Elfman. Bugs Bunny. Daffy Duck… And Steve Martin, as the evil head of the Acme corporation…]

They’ve appeared in video games…

[SFX Clip: Sunsoft commercial: Introducing the Looney Tunes family of video games, from Sunsoft.

Family pictures!

There’s Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage.

Now you’re talkin’...

Road Runner’s Death Valley Rally.

Beep beep.

Tazmania…]

And they’ve helped to advertise all sorts of things.

[SFX Clip: What’s, I say, what’s all the ruckus?

I’m a chicken hawk, and I can’t catch any chicken.

Don’t be a lunkhead, son. You wanna know how to get great chicken? Go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Maybe it’s the special way they cook that finger lickin’ good chicken… [sfx]]

[music in]

In 2020, Warner Brothers rebooted Looney Tunes with a retro look and feel. The show got great reviews. But beyond the attention from critics and fans, voice actor Eric Bauza discovered that the job came with some unexpected benefits.

Eric: It's the thing that gets me through US customs the fastest. When I'm coming back from Canada, the US customs man or a woman is going, "What's your name?" I'm like, "Eric Bauza." What is your business here in America?" … "I'm a voice actor in California." "Really? Voice actor for cartoons?" I'm like, "Yes." "What cartoon?" "Meh, what's up, Doc?" And then they become these nine-year-old kids, instantly. I could be like smuggling anything into the country, and they're like, "Whatever."

[sfx: funny music button]

For Eric, the benefits of being a Looney Tune are still pretty new. But this reboot also features someone who has a much longer history with these characters.

Jeff: The more I worked on voices, the more my ear developed and the more I began to be able to broaden the scope of the characters that I could do.

That’s Jeff Bergman.

Jeff: I am a voice actor in Los Angeles, California.

Jeff is pretty much royalty in the world of voice acting. He’s been Fred Flintstone…

[SFX Clip: Fred: Break time. Yabadabadoo!]

He’s been George Jetson…

[SFX Clip: She might be a robot, but she hates being called names, and she knows robot kung fu.]

He’s been Yogi Bear…

[SFX Clip: Yogi Bear: With the aid of these alarm clock earmuffs, I will still prove that I am smarter than the average sleeping bear.]

Jeff was the one who took over the voices of Bugs and Daffy after Mel Blanc’s passing.

[SFX Clip: Hmm, nice craftsmanship. Trouble is, it’s really duck season.

It’s a lie, it’s rabbit season!

Duck season!

Rabbit season!]

Eric: I'd say Jeff Bergman out the gate was the best performer of all of these characters. He got them all down in 1989 when Mel Blanc passed away.

Eric: He was also Bugs and Daffy at the beginning of Gremlins 2, when Bugs and Daffy are fighting over who wants to be on the shield, the Warner Brothers shield.

[SFX Clip: Daffy: I am riding the shield from now on, because I, personally, have all the talent around here.]

In the newest Looney Tunes show, Jeff plays Sylvester the Cat...

[SFX Clip: Alright, my fine feathered feast. You’ve sung your last Christmas carol.]

He also does Foghorn Leghorn…

[SFX Clip: Foghorn: Now I’m just the rooster to show them all that Fido ain’t nothing but a flea-bitten hen house zero.]

And he plays Elmer Fudd.

[SFX Clip: Elmer: Well, you told me to modernize. And what’s more modern than a rabbit killing robot? Get him robot!]

[music in]

Jeff actually met Mel Blanc back in college, before he even got into voice acting.

Jeff: I was in my junior year of college and I had just been walking around the campus one day and noticed that there was a sign that said, “Mel Blanc voice of Bugs Bunny will be appearing at the David Lawrence Hall,” which was our auditorium. And so I thought, “Wow, that's cool.” He did a lecture and he showed cartoons and he performed some of the characters he did, which was really fun to see.

Jeff: They had a little reception afterwards and I actually was able to meet him and spend time with him. And I would really say that that moment in time I had with him really affected me deeply.

When Jeff performs, he still taps into his childhood memories of Mel.

Jeff: When you're performing a character that's already in existence, the complexity with that is you're trying to recreate the essence of a person's memory of that character. And everyone has a different memory of what the character sounds like.

Jeff: When you're a kid, I think you don't always understand all the nuance in the dialogue, but certainly we laugh at all the gags, all the visual gags.

Jeff: But then as I got older, I definitely started to respond to the tremendous vocal characterizations that Mel Blanc was able to add to his performances.

[music out]

Here’s a clip of Mel Blanc voicing Sylvester in an episode from the 1940s.

[SFX Clip: Mel Blanc as Sylvester] That’s the line I’ve been waiting for. That’s my cue line. The better to eat you with!]

And here’s Jeff’s take on the character in the new series.

[SFX Clip: Jeff as sylvester: I ate that darn canary! Success is so sweet.]

For Jeff, each version of the Looney Tunes has a distinct feel.

Jeff: There's been so many incarnations of the Looney Tunes. Tiny Tunes obviously was something that was reminiscent of being the classic Bugs Bunny.

[SFX Clip: Tiny Tunes: You’re disappointing me Buster, letting that pea brained bully push you around like that.]

Jeff: Then years later, I was doing Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and they were both sort of like the odd couple living together in a suburban neighborhood. Bugs was a little bit more the parent in that situation, he was the more responsible of the characters, and would say, "Daffy, you can't do that.”

[SFX Clip: Bugs: I can’t believe I hitched my wagon to you. Daffy: You have a wagon?

Bugs: Daffy, concentrate!]

Jeff: Each show ends up being really different because everybody's interpretation is different and the writers, the way they write it, is so different in every show

[music in]

When you add up all of the creative decisions that go into a show, even the same actor playing the same character can sound pretty different.

Jeff: I don't really have control over my performance completely because each director wants you to play a character their way.

Jeff: So you're trying to do your very best to create that interpretation from the script and the way you're directed. And then, you don't have a choice in terms of the takes that they pick. They pick the takes that they like. And then sometimes your voices are sped up and sometimes not. And that really changes your performance.

Jeff: So sometimes fans will say, "Wow ...you didn't sound the same. That didn't sound right." “Well, I was at a different studio, I was on a different microphone, I was directed differently, my voice might have been sped up, it might not have been sped up." So there's so many different variables that go into it.

[music out]

The new Looney Tunes is no exception. Part of what makes it unique, comes from how it’s recorded. Rather than having the actors just read from a script…

Pete: What we would do is we always had the storyboard up in the room, because we had the storyboard drawn…

A storyboard is basically a set of rough sketches depicting what a scene is going to look like. While the actors are recording, showrunner Pete Browngardt puts the storyboard on a screen in front of them.

Pete: And I would actually click through the storyboard as they're doing it.

Pete: Every little part of the board I would click through, because I had control from my laptop in the booth to the screen in their booth.

Pete: And I would go, "Okay, now Daffy jumps out of the airplane…

[SFX Clip: Geronimoooooo!]

Pete: And he's woohooing and Porky's freaked out…

[SFX Clip: Ahhhhh! / Wooohooo!]

Pete: And then Porky asks Daffy…

[SFX Clip: What do we do now!?]

Pete: He's really freaked out and concerned right now. And then Daffy assures him that it's going to be totally fine, there's nothing to worry about,

[SFX Clip: Welp, at least that building down there will break our fall!

Pete: And Porky believes him for a second…

[SFX Clip: Thank goodness for that!]

Pete: So it's not like just words on a paper. They're seeing the pictures. They're seeing the expressions that the characters are making. So that really informs their performance.

It’s pretty rare for a modern cartoon to record this way. But it’s actually closer to how they did things back in the 1940s.

Pete: These cartoons back then never started with a script. It started with drawings. It started with gags and it started with a bunch of cartoonists sitting in a room drawing gags.

This approach is yet another way that Pete hopes to recapture the feeling of the classic Mel Blanc era.

Pete: I think it all matters, right? All we're doing is communicating ideas to each other to try to achieve this goal.

[music in]

It’s been nearly a hundred years since Looney Tunes first appeared on screen. In that time, thousands of other cartoons have come and gone. But there’s something timeless about these characters.

Pete: They are mirrors to the human condition and humans' aspirations to be better. Bugs stands up for the little guy, he fights bullies. He's the smartest guy in the room, he always has the smart thing to say. Porky is the everyman, struggling. Has a stutter and wants to do what's right, and we all kind of want to do what's right.

Jeff: They're such great characters…They're dealing with very everyday situations. And I think that… it's an escape and that's what the movies and animation is so much about, is an escape for all of us

From Mel, to Jeff, to Eric, every new interpretation adds something unique to this lineage.

Eric: There's something about each and every one of their performances that you know they're big fans, as much as I am. You know they took a piece of something of their childhood with them when they said, "Okay, I think I can get close."

Jeff: I learn from them, we all learn from each other. So I would say it's a collaborative process. We all feel really pretty lucky.

Pete: I got this advice from a teacher… “Don't worry about being original. You are original, just at birth, so whatever you do, it will be original, even if you're taking from something else…” If I was to do Looney Tunes, no matter what I do, it's going to be different and it's going to be fresh, just because I'm doing it.

Even if Eric never gets another role in his life, he’s content.

Eric: I think I might be the sixth person to do proper Bugs Bunny.

Eric: If I'm only getting the sixth person to voice Bugs, I am a happy camper, are you kidding me? "I'm totally fine with that, Doc. Totally fine.”

Eric: I never thought I would get a paycheck for saying, "Mehh, What's up, Doc?”

[music out]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. For a little taste of that sweet sweet sound design, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram.

This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Sam Rinebold. It was sound edited by Soren Begin. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter.

Thanks to our guests, Eric Bauza, Pete Browngardt, and Jeff Bergman.

If you wanna stay up to date with what’s going on at 20K, get some bonus content, and help us name episodes, you can find us on Facebook, on Twitter, on our subreddit, and you can always get in touch by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]