The Mel Blanc Show
The Man Behind a Thousand Voices Gets His Own Stage
By 1946, Mel Blanc was everywhere on American radio — and almost always playing someone else's sidekick. He was the train announcer and the violin-torturing next-door neighbor on The Jack Benny Program. He was turning up in supporting roles on Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, Point Sublime, and Judy Canova. Radio Daily magazine noted that year he specialized in "over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects" and was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles. The question wasn't whether he had the talent for a starring vehicle; it was whether a man whose gift was disappearing into characters could anchor a show as himself.
The answer CBS and sponsor Colgate offered was The Mel Blanc Show, which premiered September 3, 1946, running Tuesday nights at 8:30 in a 30-minute format. The show cast Blanc as a fictionalized version of himself — an addled young man operating a Fix-It Shop with the essential premise that everything customers brought in left in worse condition than when it arrived. It was a reasonable comic conceit. Whether the writing made the most of it was another matter.
Blanc himself brought genuine biographical roots to the character. Born Melvin Jerome Blanc — née Blank, a spelling he claimed to have changed at age sixteen — in San Francisco on May 30, 1908, he had started collecting dialects and voices as a child. The first one was a thick Yiddish accent borrowed from an elderly Jewish couple who ran a neighborhood grocery store. When his family moved to Portland, Chinatown added more sounds to his growing catalog. By high school he was doing occasional skits on local radio alongside his brother Henry. He began his radio career at nineteen in 1927 on Portland's KGW program The Hoot Owls, eventually made his way to KGO in San Francisco, and got his first taste of a national audience as Joe Penner's duck on The Baker's Broadcast. He wrote in his memoir That's Not All Folks! — co-authored with Philip Bashe and published by Warner Books in 1988 — that for a voice man intent on assimilating new dialects, "simply walking down the street provided daily education" in San Francisco.
What set Blanc apart by the mid-1940s was not just the breadth of his work but a piece of credit-line history. In 1944, after being denied a salary raise, he negotiated a screen credit from Warner Bros. studio boss Leon Schlesinger — reading "Voice characterization(s) by Mel Blanc" — becoming the first voice actor to receive regular on-screen credit in the cartoon shorts. He remained under exclusive contract to Warner Bros. until 1960. So when he stepped into a starring radio vehicle in 1946, he was doing so as a figure who had spent the last decade quietly rewriting the terms under which voice actors worked. He had the profile — if not quite the right vehicle.
The Fix-It Shop and Its Regular Customers
The sitcom's setup gave Blanc a small repertory company of recurring characters to bounce off. His girlfriend Betty Colby was played by Mary Jane Croft, a radio veteran who had started at WLW in Cincinnati in 1935 before moving to Los Angeles in 1939 and becoming one of the busiest voice actresses on Hollywood's Radio Row. Betty's father, Mr. Colby — a supermarket owner with a short fuse and an even shorter opinion of Mel — was played by Joseph Kearns, whose gruff authority was well-suited to the running joke of Mel trying and failing to win the man's approval as a serious suitor. Mr. Colby's signature line whenever Mel pushed him too far: "I'll break every bone in your body!"
Hans Conried played Mr. Cushing, president of Mel's fraternal lodge, the Loyal Order of Benevolent Zebras. Conried had studied at Columbia University and worked with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Company before settling into Hollywood radio, and he brought a certain elevated absurdity to lodge proceedings, including the group's required password: "Ugga-ugga-boo, ugga-boo-boo-ugga." Alan Reed played Mel's piano teacher, Mr. Potchnik. Jim Backus appeared as a regular supporting player, and the broader cast included Bea Benaderet, Leora Thatcher, Earle Ross, Jerry Hausner, Elvia Allman, and Sandra Gould — a deep bench drawn from working Radio Row talent.
Blanc also voiced Zookie, his stuttering Fix-It Shop helper, using the same Porky Pig cadence he'd perfected at Warner Bros. Zookie opened each broadcast with the line "Hello, every-b-uh-bbb-uh-b-bbb-uh—HI!" The Sportsmen Quartet supplied a musical number each episode and also handled the Colgate Tooth Powder commercials. Victor Miller led the orchestra, John "Bud" Hiestand announced, Joe Rines produced and directed, and the writing duties started with David Victor and Herb Little before Mac Benoff took over later in the run.
What the Plots Looked Like
The show's comic engine was straightforward: Mel's Fix-It Shop was a disaster, his efforts to impress Betty's father invariably made things worse, and the lodge provided an outlet for running gags and fraternal rituals of no discernible purpose. One episode — "The New Radio," which aired November 5, 1946 — captures the show's style neatly: Mel ruins Mr. Colby's radio, then tries to conceal the damage by hiding behind the set and voicing the programs himself as Colby turned the dial. It's a premise that leans directly on Blanc's real ability to produce a stream of distinct characters on demand, even if the writing surrounding the bit was the show's weaker element.
CBS and Colgate promoted it as a "situation comedy-variety show" competing with at least twelve similar programs that season. The Sportsmen Quartet's musical spots gave it a variety component, and the premise allowed for Blanc to cycle through voices and characters, which was presumably the point. The episode titles preserved from the run suggest the range of situations the writers threaded through the Fix-It Shop premise: "Muscle Man Contest," "The Astrologer," "Masquerade Ball," "Foreign Relatives," "Zebra of the Year." The show didn't lack for comic scenarios; what it struggled with, by most accounts, was shaping Blanc's unusual talent into a coherent formula.
What the Trade Press Made of It
The trades weren't kind, and they were specific about why. A Billboard review of the April 1, 1947 episode stated: "After more than five months... the Mel Blanc program still seems to be groping," attributing the problem primarily to the scripting. The same review observed that "Writers seem to have been misled by Blanc's vocal versatility into trying to introduce too many odd characters." The diagnosis was pointed: the writers kept reaching for the one thing Blanc could do that no one else could, and in doing so lost the coherent situation comedy underneath.
Billboard's May 24, 1947 issue reported the cancellation, noting that sponsor Colgate-Palmolive Peet had "ordered the show dropped at end of the current cycle, June 24," citing a "general retrenchment program." The show's final broadcast aired on that date, June 24, 1947 — nine months and change after it started. Interestingly, the June 1947 issue of Radio Mirror magazine included it in its Recommended Listening column, describing it as "impossible-situations-made-to-seem-real." Critical reception, such as it was, remained uneven right to the end. The writing, from the vantage of later years, has the quality of its moment — the kind of broad situation comedy formula that was everywhere in 1946 and aged accordingly.
A Cast That Went Places
One of the more striking things about The Mel Blanc Show in retrospect is how many of its regulars went on to define other characters in other media. Alan Reed, who played piano teacher Mr. Potchnik, was born Herbert Theodore Bergman in New York City in 1907. He became the original voice of Fred Flintstone on Hanna-Barbera's The Flintstones from 1960 to 1966 — and Reed himself improvised the catchphrase "Yabba dabba doo!" from a script that simply called for Fred to say "Yahoo!" Joseph Kearns, who spent the run of the show threatening to break every bone in Mel's body as Mr. Colby, is best remembered today as George Wilson on the CBS television series Dennis the Menace from 1959 to 1962, and also voiced the Doorknob in Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland. Hans Conried, the lodge president with the nonsense password, later voiced Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan (1953) and Snidely Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right cartoons. Mary Jane Croft went on to work alongside Lucille Ball for nearly two decades across I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, and Here's Lucy.
And then there's the Blanc-Reed-Benaderet connection itself: both Reed and Bea Benaderet, who appeared in the supporting cast of The Mel Blanc Show, would later reunite with Blanc on The Flintstones — Reed as Fred Flintstone, Benaderet as Betty Rubble. The show that couldn't quite find its footing in 1946 and 1947 was, in that sense, an early gathering point for people who would later find their places elsewhere.
How It Holds Up
The entire run of The Mel Blanc Show — which also circulated under the alternate titles Mr. Blanc's Fix-It Shop and simply Fix-It Shop — is preserved, a complete nine months of Tuesday nights at 8:30 on CBS. That's a rarer condition than it might seem for radio comedy from 1946. The collection was certified accurate on May 10, 2010, meaning all episodes are properly identified and labeled, with the certified set fitting on two CDs. (The designation indicates accurate identification rather than absolute completeness — additional extant episodes beyond the certified set are possible.)
What the surviving episodes document is a show that knew what its star could do but couldn't always figure out what to do with it. Blanc's talent was genuine and wide — the Porky Pig stutter he lent to Zookie, the stream of voices he could produce on demand, the physical comedy that translated across radio through timing and inflection. But the show consistently worked better as a vehicle for those isolated moments than as a sustained half-hour situation comedy. His work on The Jack Benny Program and in similar supporting roles gave him a structure and a straight man that his own show, for all its nine months of trying, never quite managed to supply.