Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/Sound
From Eccentric Flower
The Soundtrack
I don't note voice credits for these films unless it's an unusual situation. "Unusual situation" is defined here as "involving voice actors other than Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan."
Wikipedia describes Blanc as "one of the most influential people in the voice-acting industry." I would take that even further and say that, in terms of people who did professional voice-acting and nothing else, for a large part of his sixty-year career, Blanc was the voice-acting industry.
Blanc began as a radio actor in 1927; he continued to do radio work right up to the end of the radio era, in addition to his cartoons and occasional advertising work. He joined the Schlesinger crew in 1936; the only major Warner character who precedes him is Porky Pig. Blanc invented the voices of virtually all the other male Warner cartoon characters (with one prominent exception discussed below). He holds records for longest and second-longest period a cartoon character has been voiced by its original voice artist (Daffy Duck, 52 years or more depending on how you count it; Bugs Bunny, some 49 years); his only serious competitor is Clarence Nash's Donald Duck. He was considered irreplaceable because no other voice actor had his range, even if some of that range was abetted by technology (Daffy Duck is essentially Sylvester played at a slightly higher speed).
Blanc died in 1989. His tombstone (at his request) says "That's All, Folks."
Blanc was reportedly pretty savvy about protecting what would today be called his "intellectual property." He requested, and got, the screen credit which said "Voice characterizations by Mel Blanc." Some sources would have it that he also demanded an exclusive voice credit, with no other voice actors getting billing, but I can find no evidence of this. What leads people to this conclusion is that the habit was not to bill voice actors at all (this didn't change until the 1960's), so while Blanc had taken pains to get his billing, no other voice actors got any.
The main victim of this policy was Arthur Q. Bryan. June Foray, Bea Benaderet and others who did Warner cartoon voice work did so only on occasion; Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd, did this as a steady job, but never got a screen credit for playing Elmer in the entire twenty years he did so, from the evolution of the character in 1939 until his death in 1959.
Bryan did a certain amount of other work for radio and television (not to the extent that Blanc did), but never achieved any real prominence. His most notable role other than Elmer was playing Doc Gamble in the radio series "Fibber McGee and Molly."
To hear Bryan's real voice, try the cartoon A Pest in the House, where he voices the tired hotel guest as himself (in addition to playing Elmer). To hear Blanc's real voice, try the bartender who serves Ray Milland in Slick Hare.
When discussing contributions to the soundtracks of Warner cartoons, it would be a mistake to omit Tregoweth Brown. While Treg Brown is most often credited as simply an "editor," and he was indeed a film/sound editor, he was also the cartoons' sound effects man. (There is a persistent story that Schlesinger credited him as "Editor" because he felt "Sound Effects" was undignified.) Some of his sound effects were recorded/found noises (he was known to routinely travel with a portable recorder to capture good sounds); some of them he performed on various equipment/gadgets (he kept a "box of tricks" in his office full of various noisemaking junk).
Brown's contributions to the cartoons were irreplaceable, and people in the film sound industry admire him greatly, but for the average viewer, the importance of knowing his name is so that you can find him when he shows up as an in-joke in the cartoons (most obviously in One Froggy Evening on the cornerstone of the "Tregoweth Brown Building.")
Brown died in 1984. An astonishing number of his effects recordings are still in use today.
