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Mel Blanc on his favorite Looney Tunes character
The story behind "sufferin' succotash"!
In his autobiography, That's not all Folks!, Mel Blanc gave a deep dive into his approach to voicing cartoon characters. He took each character's appearance and physique into consideration when developing the voice, like when he first voiced Sylvester the cat he said "When I was first shown the model sheet of Sylvester, with his floppy jowls and generally disheveled appearance, I said to Friz Freleng, 'A big sloppy cat should have a big, shthloppy voice.' He should spray even more than Daffy." Blanc was so committed to Sylvester's overly exaggerated lisp that he would have to wipe saliva off of his scripts. He even joked with June Foray, the voice of Granny, that she should wear a raincoat to recording sessions.
While Blanc enjoyed most of his Looney Tunes characters, he eventually admitted that Sylvester was his favorite, "Sylvester has always been a favorite of mine. He's a great deal like Daffy: a perpetual fall guy with a near-identical voice. Daffy's is pitched up slightly, while Sylvester's is recorded at regular speed and sounds the closest to my natural way of speaking. He's always been the easiest character for me to play." Blanc comes across as passionately protective of Sylvester in his memoir, he even defends Sylvester's tactics as the efforts of a starving cat dealing with Tweety, who was nowhere near the innocent baby bird audiences believed him to be. He also disliked that Tweety, who was unquestionable the fan favorite, got main billing on cartoons that were clearly Tweety and Sylvester duo comedies.
For Sylvester's catchphrase, Blanc pulled a line from his days as a radio star "Keeping in mind Sylvester's spluttering delivery, I wanted a phrase with two or more s's in it. Since I already borrowed his voice for Daffy, I had no compunctions about nicking a line from another of my creations: traveling salesman Roscoe E. Wortle from radio's 'The Judy Canova Show.' The line, of course, was 'thsufferin' thsuccotash." The voice "borrowed" for Daffy and Sylvester was from another character on The Judy Canova Show and that character's name was...Sylvester! The original radio show character's name likely inspired changing the cat originally known as Thomas to Sylvester.
