What's Up Doc?
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Best of season is almost upon us. And so I am here with a best of list. This is Lulu Miller, by the way, you're listening to Radiolab. And I have with me a best of list that our producer W. Harry Fortuna brought to our attention recently. It is a best of list that he remembers reading as a kid, published in the Washington Post. They put together a best of the millennium.

And so I'm going to read a couple of the items here. We've got best work of art, the Sistine Chapel. It's a good work of art. Best scientist, Einstein. Biggest irony, quote, the rehabilitation of intuition, faith, and emotion as powers of equal or greater import than reason. Greatest genius, Shakespeare. But the surprise of the whole list for Harry is

And for me too, now that I've read it, is who won Best Actor? From the year 1000 to 2000, who is it? Bugs freaking Bunny. And I'm not sure that I agree, but I do know that Bugs Bunny holds a very, very special and rare distinction. He is the only imaginary friend to have literally brought his creator back from the brink of death.

Something I learned listening to this episode, which first aired back in 2012. Oh, I should have brought a carrot, but snap. What's up, doc? I hope you enjoy. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? Rewind. Rewind.

Hey, here we are, post-hurricane. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And today... Well, you might call this a character study, I suppose. Yeah. Comes from our producer, Sean Cole. Hello. Hey. So, start us off. The story's about Mel Blanc. The man of many. You know who that is. No, I don't.

You don't know who Mel Blanc is? Why, should I know who he is? No, you do know who he is because of what he did. What did he do? He was the voice of... What's up, Jack? Bugs Bunny. Yeah. Oh. And... You're despicable. Daffy Duck. Porky Pig. They're lucky me. Yosemite Sam. So long, rabbit! Pepe Le Pew. You smelled me out, you little sandy witch. Stand still! Sylvester. Okay, Puddy Jack. Tweety. I say go away, Bugs Bunny.

Uh, corn like corn. That was all one guy? Yeah. Okay, so what's the story? Dude, I'm nowhere near done with this.

Woody Woodpecker? Yes, who? Mel Blanc. Barney Rubble. Is it safe to come in? Mel Blanc. Dino the Dinosaur? Mel Blanc. And on the other side of the anachronistic spectrum... Oh, you guys won't believe this. He was Mr. Spacely for the Jetson. Really? Yes. Where's that Jetson? Let's see. Who put the anti-face in my cabaret? Speed Buggy? Secret Squirrel? Captain Caveman? Captain Cave!

And Twiggy from Buck Rogers. If you ever watched that. Yeah. What about the bomb? Holy s***. This guy was like the voice of my childhood. Voice says. Well, it sounds like a crowd.

Oh my gosh, my dad got so many requests to do so many voices. This is Noel Blank, Mel's son, his only kid actually. Kids would come to the door literally every single day and he'd answer the door and talk to the kids. Then up at Big Bear where we are now, when the tour boats come just like they do now, we'd get on the megaphone, do the characters and say hi to all the tourists, you know, 12 times a day. Holy moly.

That's how many tour boats we have. Now, and you do voices too. That's right, Doc. I do a few of the voices that my daddy does and did. He did 1,500 voices. 1,500? Yeah, I copy a few of them.

And there's a bunch of us that do different voices, and we've never been able to really sound exactly like him. So it took many of you to be one of him. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh, yes. I do Bugs, Porky, Daffy, Tweety, Sylvester, but there's other people that do it too. And all of them sound, you know, if he goes, What's up, Doc? You know, it can sound real close to him, but then when you start to do sentences, you

It becomes very difficult for anybody to sound like him because everybody has their own voice print. And Mel had his own voice print. But this isn't really a story about voices. Or it is, but not in the way that you think. It's really about what it's like to breathe life into a character and whether that character can breathe life back into you.

See, back in 1961, Mel and Noel went into business together, producing radio commercials. Funny commercials. Because humorous commercials weren't really being done at that time. Very few. So we decided to start to do that. We sent out all the brochures. And that's the week, the same week, that Mel had a head-on collision at Dead Man's Curve.

At UCLA. Where was he headed? He had just finished a recording session in San Francisco. He had flown to San Francisco early in the morning, came back, ate dinner with my mom. Then rushed back out to do another recording session. And a kid in a 98 Oldsmobile, gigantic car, lost control on dead man's curve. Head-on collision. My dad was in an Aston Martin, which was an aluminum-bodied English car, and it folded right up.

They had to cut him out of there. Luckily, he was only a block from the UCLA hospital. Is that like the Jaws of Life cut him out? Yeah, yeah. They gave him a thousand to one chance of survival, and he broke virtually every bone in his body. Well, I think that was more than a slight exaggeration, but from his point of view, it probably felt just like that. This is Lewis Conway. Lewis W. Conway, uh,

I do very little these days. He's a doctor. Before I retired, I was a neurosurgeon. And he was on the floor at UCLA Medical Center back then. I was a resident. He was like 29 at the time. I think I was the first one to see Mel Blanc in the emergency room. Completely unrecognizable at the time. You know, blood and gore and so forth. So we cleaned him up and then it became clear that he was...

going to be a major celebrity in the place, providing I kept him alive. When you show up at the hospital, what's the first... How are you greeted there? By a lot of flashing cameras. And that all of a sudden, I knew something was really bad. I met my mom. We went inside. There were a lot of people there. The papers and... Because they thought he was going to die. In fact, there was an obituary written in the Honolulu Herald that said Bugs Bunny's dead.

That was the headline? Headline. And, uh... He must have been really freaked out. Oh, yeah. Totally. So was my mom. We were just, we couldn't believe it. And he was ashen gray. He didn't look like he was going to make it at all. The doctors did manage to get him stabilized, but he was unconscious. He was in a coma. So we just stayed there, ran home, take a shower, come back. For one day, then the next, then the next. We were at the hospital for about two weeks.

Trying to talk to him? Yeah. Can you hear us? It was always, can you hear me? Dad, can you hear me? I mean, deeply unconscious, not responding. I call him Dad, Pop, Father, whatever it is. Mel, we try to do anything. Not opening his eyes. There was really no response. And it became possible that he would never respond. But after about 14 days, a doctor came in. He was a resident. Dr. Conway. This is me, the resident. He was a resident, and he went over to Mel's bed.

And for whatever reason, maybe just to mix things up... I said to him, uh... Without any real reason to suspect he would know what I was saying... I said to him... Bugs. Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today? And I'll be darned if Mel didn't go... Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's up, Doc? He responded as Bugs? Yeah. Quite, uh, clearly...

What? Then he went, Porky, are you there? Dad said, I can hear you. I can hear you. I can hear you. Tweety, are you here? Ooh. Tony, putty check. Foghorn Lakehorn? Pay attention, son. You see that house over there that says D-O-G? That spells chicken. He said all that? Yeah. Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Sylvester. All these characters. He went through about six characters. Are you standing there watching this? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And what's going through your mind at the time? Well, I'm so excited that he's able to, that he came out of the coma. How else are you going to feel when he hasn't done anything for 14 days, really hasn't been conscious, and then all of a sudden, he's conscious doing these characters. And then, according to Noel, after doing the characters for a few moments, he just came back. Where am I? What happened? As Mel. Oh, okay. You're at UCLA. You were in a traffic accident. Oh, was anybody else hurt? No? The boy had a scratched knee? I see. Yeah.

So wait just a sec here. When he said, uh, what's up, doc? Was that Mel Blanc talking or was that Bugs Bunny inside Mel Blanc? That's the question. And it's a question that actually came back again 23 years later. Mr. Mel Blanc, this is your life. Thank you.

On TV, on this show, this is your life that you've heard of, and they bring out a celebrity, and they take the celebrity's family and everybody they work with, and they say, like, hey, remember this and remember that. Mel's funny voices used to drive our high school principal crazy.

And you know, it's all very light and airy and fun until... 8:29 p.m., January 24th, 1961. It all comes to a crashing halt. They start talking about the car accident, and they call the doctor out to the stage. Neurosurgeon Dr. Lewis Conway. Enter stage right to tell the whole coma story, and the host says, "Doc, what did you think when this all happened?" I was astonished. Mel was dying, and it seemed as though Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life.

That. That is the idea that has survived more than any other part of this story. That's the thing that keeps coming back and back. And it's like, wait a second. Like, what? What does it mean? What does it mean? And it just presents all of these questions. Like, who...

Is Mel really? Who is Bugs Bunny really? When you make somebody up, do they compete with you in some way? Compete and win. Right, exactly. Is that more deeply in Mel than Mel is? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. I brought Dr. Conway back to that moment. It seemed as though Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life. I don't remember saying that, but I may well have. Do you think there's anything to that?

Well, I don't really know that Bugs Bunny was that skillful, but so I'd basically say not much to it, I don't think. So I asked Noel. It's an interesting headline, Bugs Bunny saves Mel. He didn't save his life, but he certainly got him out of the coma.

Then he told me something that does feed into the idea that these characters had minds of their own. He says as a kid, he would watch his dad perform, and every time... He became those characters. I could turn the sound off in a booth where you couldn't hear him, just turn the speakers off and watch him and know exactly what character he was doing because his whole body would metamorphosize to that character.

He looked like Bugs Bunny when he was doing Bugs. He looked just like Yosemite Sam when he was doing Yosemite Sam. He became really small and timid when he was doing Tweety. So he was sort of like a method actor. Yeah, sort of. I mean, the way Noel described it, it was like these characters momentarily inhabited him. So I think they were part of him, basically. But still, what I don't get, though, is why would he respond to What's Up Bugs rather than, like, What's Up Mel or What's Up Dad or What's Up Honey? You know what I mean? That's...

- That's a difficult question. You know, I wish I could answer it. - Noel didn't really wanna go there. - Anyway, what other questions do you have?

You were stuck on that one. I kind of am stuck on it. And I know that it's not a question anybody can ultimately answer, but I called up this guy. This is Oren Davinsky at NYU Medical Center. A neurologist that we sometimes throw questions like this to. And I ran him through the whole scenario. This guy comes into the room and says, Hi, Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today? And he says, What's up, Doc?

Interesting. So he batted around in his head for a while and then he said, well, you know, it might have something to do with cues, like getting the cues mixed up.

What do you mean? Well, first of all... Being in a coma for a few weeks speaks to a very significant brain injury. And what Oren often sees with people who've had brain injuries, like Mel's, is that they lose the ability to read the cues that tell them who they're supposed to be when. Dad at home, boss at the office, bugs in the studio, whatever. Here's a man who no longer has his ability to...

differentiate social cues of right and wrong, of when to be Bugs Bunny and when not to be Bugs Bunny, where he is and where he isn't. You have to keep in mind that when he was working, this is a guy who was getting cued all the time. He was doing 18 radio shows a week at one time.

Wow. So he'd just be running down the street from ABC to CBS to NBC, and they'd hand him a script, and he'd run on stage and do it. So he...

had those characters buried in himself that could come out, surface incredibly fast. On a dime. Yeah. Here's the script. That's the character. Boom. So if he's got all these characters hanging around in his head, just waiting for the right cue, and in his head, that part of the brain that interprets the cues is all messed up, maybe in a way, when Dr. Conway said, Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today? Maybe the way Mel heard it was, Hey, Mel. Oh.

You're on. In his mind, I may have been the director at the time, for all I know. Even the good doctor went along with this one. It's as though he was given permission to talk now because it was his time to talk, sort of thing.

So on one level, it's obviously crazy to think that Bugs Bunny saved his life because after all, he was just a cartoon character. But whether or not those characters saved him, I mean, in that moment, they were the most essential part of him, you could say. Because when the rest of Mel was adrift and sort of

in the ether, Bugs was there. He was ready to go to work. Which makes perfect sense to Oren Davinsky. I mean, that was a rehearsed thing that he did. Once you practice things long enough, they kind of become automatic in lower portions of the brain. And that's why when the higher brain's injured sometimes, these lower brain injuries

Functions can come out so beautifully because they have been kind of wired in over time. So the Bugs Bunny voice was perfectly preserved deep inside. Bugs Bunny is like crystallized and kept over here in a protective jar away from the rattling cage of the brain. Exactly. He went down into the safe.

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So what ended up happening to Mel? Well, he took a long time to recover. And was in a body cast for, gosh, seven months. But he worked the entire time. I mean, he never stopped working. They're bringing the equipment to him. I brought the equipment in, dangled a mic over the bed, and he started to work there. Awesome.

In fact, the first 65 Flintstones. You would never know this. Barney in real life. What's on your mind, Barney? I'm kind of busy. Was flat on his back in a body cast. Just passing by on my way to see the doctor. The doctor? What's the matter with you, Barney boy? And then in 1989, for the first time, Noel and Mel both were starring in this commercial for Oldsmobile. Mel's 81 in the shtick. They did a bunch of these. The shtick was, you know, not your father's Oldsmobile. We did the commercial.

It took us all day to do it. And he had just gotten over the flu, so he wasn't feeling that great. And I says, Dad, why don't you run over to the doctor? So he goes over to the doctor, and I call the doctor. I says, what's the story? He says, well, he's fine. I can give him a shot and send him home, but I'd love to clear his lungs out. So why don't we just put him in the hospital overnight, clear his lungs out, and then send him home? So I talked to my dad. I says, you want to do that? He says, well, okay. What the heck?

I'll see you in the morning, Pop. Oh, yeah. Got there the next morning about 7.30. I says, how do you feel? He says, my leg hurts. I says, why? The nurses at the hospital forgot to put up the bed rails on the side of the bed. Well, you know how high a hospital bed is. He had fallen out of the bed and broken his femur. Fat emboli got into the brain by that time. And within 48 hours, he was basically almost brain dead. Yeah.

During the next couple of days, he'd come in and out of his coma or in and out of his sleep. And I tried to rouse him with the characters like the doctor had 30 years earlier. You would? Yeah. Bugs are you in there? Yeah.

It was very difficult at that time because he's 30 years older now. He's 81 years old. And it was difficult to revive him after each time that he would fall back to sleep again. And just before his dad passed away, Noel says that Mel looked at him and in the voice of Yosemite Sam, he said, Noel, I love you. And that was about it. Oh, my God.

That's the last character he did. And the last character on film, or recorded character... Which was in that Oldsmobile ad I told you about. ...was Porky saying, that's all folks. And that's what his tombstone says, too. That's all folks. Wow. Thank you, Sean Cole. Sean does some good voices himself. He does, but we won't share them with you. Not in the company of Mr. Mel Blanc. No! No!

Very, very big thanks to Noel Blank, Mel Blank's son. And to Dr. Lewis Conway, the doctor. And to Robert's boyfriend, Oren Davinsky. That's an inside joke. I do like Oren Davinsky. Oh, and a huge thanks to Mel Blank himself, wherever he may be, for all those voices that populated our youth. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. Thanks for listening. The V, the V, and that's all, folks.

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