This is totally random but I thought I'd share. I'm sure many of you know this but for those of you like me who were unaware:
In an encyclopedia entry on Mel Blanc I read that Daffy Duck's voice was actually the same voice he used for doing Sylvester, except they sped up the Sylvester-voice in post-production to turn it into Daffy Duck. It made sense when I (quite poorly) impersonated it to myself after reading that, but I had
-no- clue, so I used the amazing free audio software Audacity as recommended by RupertPiston and sped up a Sylvester clip by 20%. Here's the clip, it's uncanny.
http://studentofanimation.com/images/SlyDaffy.mp3
OK, back to work. Thought that was a neat little piece of trivia.
This clip doesn't belong to me, is not related to Student of Animation and I'll remove it within the next day or so. It's just the only place I have for storing files online.
You sped that up in Audacity?? That second one sounds exactly like Daffy!
If you have the program, grab a Sly clip (or I guess you could reverse a Daff clip) and Change Speed (not tempo or pitch). 17.4 is the exact value I used. 20 is actually a bit much. Fun stuff.
holy crap, thats unbelievable! awesome discovery!
I believe this is the actual excerpt
Blanc reveals in his autobiography that Sylvester's voice and Daffy's were identical, but Daffy's was sped up in post-production.
Reading on I found out that he also had another piece of derivative vocal work: Barney Rubble's laugh is twin brother to Foghorn Leghorn's chuckle. Go ahead, play it back in your mind! "Uh-HEE-HEE-HEE-h! Uh-HEE-HEE-HEE-h!" Supposedly for live peformances Mel learned to reproduce the sped-up voice effect, which I imagine with all of his practice wasn't too hard. I wonder whose idea that was to create a Daffy voice like that.
You could almost confuse their personalities. I remember a quote once by Chuck Jones (heavy, likely inaccurate paraphrasing) that we enjoy Bugs Bunny because he's who we long to be; we like Daffy Duck because he's who we really are =)
Great experiment.
Read his autobio years ago. Blanc's natural voice was also described just like sylvester's without the lisp.