Within a few months, he had an agent and his first booking.

I was able to get 100 to 150 voices over that summer.'Īlso in 1981, Bergman says, he tried a stunt worthy of a Bugs cartoon: He dressed up as a delivery person to get an audition tape into the hands of decision-makers at the William Morris Agency. Maybe he could actually build a career doing 'silly voices.' For the next several months, 'I was just like a madman in my room, working on television and film characters. 'That was the watershed moment for me,' Bergman says. The elder actor advised Bergman to stay in school and keep developing his talents. 'We sat on those two little, single uncomfortable beds and faced each other like father and son,' Bergman recounts, 'and he could not have been more warmhearted and sweet.'īergman did some of his impressions for Blanc, including George Burns and Jack Benny. The dapper Blanc, then in his 70s, opened the door clad in a vibrant Cordovan-colored robe, and the conversation soon flowed. 'I knocked on that door and when I heard a voice that sounded kind of like Barney Rubble saying, 'Just a jiffy,' I just shuddered.' 'Something compelled me to do it without hesitation,' Bergman says of his 10 p.m. The legendary actor had originated and cultivated the sounds of Bugs and other Looney Tunes characters, and worked on such Hanna-Barbera shows as 'The Flintstones' and 'The Jetsons.' Bergman, then a 20-year-old theater student at the University of Pittsburgh, discovered where Blanc was staying on campus and worked up the nerve to meet the man. The actor lends his elastic larynx to a trove of animated characters in the new sequel 'Space Jam: A New Legacy,' most notably Bugs Bunny in his stream of street-wise riffing opposite LeBron James - who follows in the Nike footsteps of Michael Jordan from the original 1996 hit.įor the veteran voice artist, it all began 40 years ago when Mel Blanc was passing through Pittsburgh on a lecture tour.

Voice of elmer fudd