With apologies to Paul Harvey and his “and now for the rest of the story” gimmick for the title of this post. The oddity in the rest of the title is deliberate, as you’ll see in a moment.

Back in the 1930s, when animated cartoons first came to life,  the studios did not typically give any on-screen credit to the actors who supplied the cartoon character’s voices. However, it was often those voices that made the cartoon figures so memorable. After all, we remember what Bugs Bunny sounded like as much as what he looked like; read this line:”Eh, What’s up, Doc?” and you probably hear Bug’s distinctive “voice” in your head.

Now, the man who gave Bugs his voice, Mel Blanc, worked for many different studios before the early 1940s. In the early 1940s, he decided to ask the producer of the Looney Tunes cartoons at Warner Brothers for a raise.  After all, he was doing multiple characters in the Looney Tunes series, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, etc.. The producer, like many of the studio bosses, was notoriously tight-fisted, and didn’t want to give him more money. However, they reached a compromise: Mel Blanc agreed to sign a long-time exclusive contract with Warner Brothers and in exchange, in lieu of more money, his contract stipulated that every cartoon he worked on would have the following on-screen credit:

“Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc.”

This was the first time the person behind the voice in the cartoons was identified on-screen like that. The resulting publicity surrounding this acknowledgement of Blanc as the voice behind the Looney Tunes Cartoons led to Mel Blanc’s personal popularity soaring.  He became the most prolific of all the voice talents around back then and was popularly known as “The Man of a Thousand Voices.” This all happened after he was able to negotiate a contract that provided for him to get on-screen credit for his work that he so richly deserved. It was a great moment for this previously unknown voice actor, and for the idea of voice actors everywhere. A victory for the little guy going against the big studio Goliath to get the credit where credit was due. What a great story.

At least that’s what I always thought.

But then …

Chris and I were watching an old movie the other night called Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime. As part of a little comedy bit early on the movie, a portly man carrying a load of books has an amusing exchange with Ellery Queen. The man’s face is initially obscured by the huge pile of books, and so you only hear his voice.

And the voice sounded exactly like the voice of Elmer Fudd, the comic foil for Bugs Bunny in many a Looney Tunes cartoon, complete with that “wascally” lisp and crazy accent that Elmer Fudd always had.

Chris and I were startled, first because we’d never heard that voice used in a live-action film like that. Then, we were further taken aback when the man’s face was revealed, because the man was clearly not Mel Blanc. Was this little comedy bit some sort of deliberate parody or homage to the Elmer Fudd voice and character? That seemed unlikely, since the movie was made in 1941, about the time that Looney Tunes were just starting to become really popular.

The actor listed in the credits for the movie was Arthur Q. Bryan. Some quick research on the Internet soon revealed that Arthur Q. Bryan was really the person behind the voice of Elmer Fudd in all those classic Looney Tunes cartoons. That character was NOT voiced by Mel Blanc. So in this Ellery Queen movie, Arthur Q. Bryan was just employing his standard crazy-character voice for his bit part in this movie, which he later went on to use with great success for Elmer Fudd at Warner Brothers.

In fact, the animator at Warner Brothers who drew Elmer Fudd at one point re-designed the character’s body using Bryan’s portly size as a model. Later they decided the voice was funny enough on its own, so the character’s body was downsized again.

But regardless of his body type of Elmer Fudd’s voice was always done by Bryan, until Bryan passed away in 1960.

I’d never known that, though, since the on-screen credits for the Elmer Fudd/Bugs Bunny cartoons read:

“Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc.”

I always thought that meant all the voices were by Mel Blanc, which apparently is what a lot of people thought, too, at the time.

So, why isn’t Arthur Q. Bryan listed on-screen as well? Can we put the blame on the studio?

Not entirely, as it turns out. You see,  Mel Blanc was a rather shrewd negotiator. Not only did his contract stipulate that his name be listed on-screen in the credits of the cartoons he worked on, his contract further stipulated that his be the only name listed with voice characterization credit. Even if other actors also worked on the movie.

As I mentioned, Blanc subsequently became the most prolific voice actor in the business, partly due to his talent, but also due to the fact that his was the only name anyone ever saw on screen. There were almost always other voice talents providing the voices for characters in the same cartoons as Mel Blanc. You just never got to see their names.

And now you know … as Elmer Fudd would say … the west of the stowwy.

*****

Luckily for the men and women who were unheralded at the time, it is possible to find all this out nowadays on the Internet. Actually, in 1961, most everybody did start to get on-screen credit for their voice work, but this change came too late for Arthur Q. Bryan, who passed away in 1960.

But here are a few clips for you to enjoy some of his work:

1. You can hear Bryan as Elmer Fudd in this clip from the cartoon Wascally Wabbit that cartoon is the first of the four that were done with Elmer’s bigger body type.
2. In this next clip, you see the real Bryan in a live-action bit using the Elmer Fudd voice.
3. And then in this clip, Bryan is singing while acting in a live-action short called “The Golfer’s Lament”,  also using his Elmer Fudd voice.

The Elmer Fudd lispy voice wasn’t Bryan’s normal speaking voice, BTW. In this audio-only clip, you can hear him voice the character of police Lieutenant Levinson on the Richard Diamond radio show. While Bryan’s character does pop up in all the episodes of that series, if you scroll down the playlist on the right-side of that page, look for #96 “Chapel Hill Police Office Symposium”. Bryan enters the action around the 3:45 minute mark, which is earlier on in the plot than in most of the episodes.

BTW, if you listen to a Richard Diamond episode all the way to the end, you’ll hear Dick Powell, who plays the lead character, sing a song to his girl friend: hard-boiled detective meets Hollywood crooner. Fascinatingly bizarre, but the show was extremely popular.