INTERVIEW: Bob Bergen Hams It Up for The “Looney Tunes”

INTERVIEW: Bob Bergen Hams It Up for The “Looney Tunes”

May 26th, 2020

W.R. Miller

After Mel Blanc, the actor voicing Porky Pig the most has been Bob Bergen, from Tiny Toon Adventures to Duck Dodgers to the new Looney Tunes Cartoons on HBOMax. As it turns out, Porky had inspired him to become a voice actor.

Born in St. Louis, Bergen moved to Los Angeles to train and ply his vocal craft. His early work included dubbing for Streamline Pictures as Lupin the 3rd on Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle of Cagliostro and two Lupin the 3rd series episodes, “Farewell, My Beloved Lupin” and “Wings of Death: Albatross,” and Masaru, Kaisuke and the Inspector in Akira. Bergen has since amassed numerous credits, including Wembley Fraggle and The World’s Oldest Fraggle on Fraggle Rock: The Animated Series (1987); Porky Pig, Tweety, Marvin the Martian and Hubie and Bertie in Space Jam (1996), Eric Staufer on Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase (2001); No-Face in Spirited Away (2001); and Luke Skywalker on various Star Wars videogames and Robot Chicken.

Today, Bergen continues to voice Porky in all his stuttering glory in Looney Tunes Cartoons for the new streaming service, HBO Max. I spoke with him May 21, 2020.

Bob Miller: Tell us, what is your inspiration for becoming a voice actor?

Bob Bergen: The character I’m playing on Looney Tunes Cartoons, I wanted to be Porky Pig since I was a kid.

BM: So you’ve practiced the voice all this time.

BB: Yeah. My mom used to tell a story that I would be a kid in front of the TV. She’d be in the kitchen on Saturday morning doing whatever and she’d hear a line on the TV and then she’d hear the line repeated. And she thought, “That’s odd.” And she stood behind me and Porky Pig would be on TV saying [as Porky], “Hey, Daffy. What are you doing?” And I’d be behind him going [as Porky], “Hey, Daffy. What are you doing?” I just always wanted to play this character.

Bob Bergen

BM: (chuckles) That’s great. Well, how did you actually land the role, and when did you do it?

BB: We moved to L.A. when I was 14. I found Mel Blanc’s phone number in the phone book. I called him up. He mentioned the name of a studio he was working at that week. I crashed the session pretending to be his assistant, and realized, okay, he’s still doing that and I’m 14, this isn’t gonna happen right now. So I just started studying acting and improv. I got my first voiceover agent a week out of high school. And I was a working voiceover actor in the ‘80s when opportunity arose, and I was able to—through a series of auditions—get my first Porky Pig gig. But it was something that I strategically worked towards.

BM: Well, what was the first project for you as Porky?

BB: Tiny Toon Adventures was the first Porky job I did. And then a variety of commercials and whatnot. It started to pick up with the Air Jordan spots with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes characters that eventually became Space Jam.

BM: What was your formal training in acting?

BB: Lots. I spent two years at Meisner Acting Conservatory [at The Ruskin School of Acting, in Santa Monica, CA]. I did three years of improv study and ten years of various voiceover classes. And I still work with coaches. If I’ve got a big audition coming up, a promo or some genre of voice-over that I think I need a little kick in the pants, I’ll definitely still hire a coach.

BM: Many actors that I’ve talked to have music and improv backgrounds. Do you have a music background?

BB: Not really, although I’ve sung on a lot of things—Looney Tunes albums, children’s albums. I’ve done lots of theme songs that need singing, but I’m not musically trained. Improv, definitely. I spent three years studying improv. That’s a huge part of my training background.

BM: When you’re recording as Porky, do they allow you to do improv on the new series?

BB: Oh, yeah. The writers are really good. They write in wonderful gags but they’re always very open to my own, “Can I try it this way? Can I try it that way?” When we have new a show or a new project, oftentimes they’ll write in Porky’s stutter on the script, and I’m like, “Guys, don’t do that, because I can’t find the story. I’m just searching for the actual line and I’m stumbling through Ws and Ts and Rs. Trust that I know how to stutter for this character.” So I don’t plan where I stutter. I don’t think about it. It’s organic. So when I’m stammering for a joke, I stammer until my brain thinks of that joke, but that’s the improv training that I’ve had.

It’s all acting. No matter how you slice it, it’s acting. I teach animation voiceover and people call me all the time saying, “I would like to do voices for cartoons, but I don’t want to act.”

And I’ll be like, “Well, that’s like saying, I wanna do ballet, but I don’t wanna dance.” No matter how you slice it, it’s acting. If you can’t bring those words to life, then you’re just making funny sounds and it’s not going work.

BM: Right, right. Well, now, are you still recording Looney Tunes shorts?

BB: We are, indeed.

BM: Are you doing voice recording at home? [Due to the coronavirus crisis.]

BB: I am, indeed. Yes. And it’s a fairly new phenomenon for us for the last two months.

BM: So does that prohibit you from doing ensemble recording?

BB: (laments) It does, yeah. And that’s probably the hardest part is, I’m all by myself, so I miss my cast. A lot of the shorts I’m doing, it’s Daffy and Porky and I miss that back-and-forth with Eric [Bauza, who performs Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck].

BM: Now, the acoustics from the classics, the golden age of Looney Tunes, there’s a slight reverb to the characters when they spoke.

BB: Yep.

BM: Do you try to match that reverb in your recordings?

BB: That’s not my job. That is the engineer’s job. And do you know why there was that reverb? It’s because all the classic Looney Tunes were recorded on actual Warner Brother sound stages, whatever sound stage was available. And those are big loud echo-ey rooms. So when you heard Yosemite Sam scream, you heard that room noise. Where today, everything, all the sound studios, my home studio, is dead. It’s a very quiet sound. And the microphones that they used back then were ribbon mics where we’re using digital mics. So it’s a very different technical process today than it was back then. But I would love to, just for fun, go into a sound stage at Warner Bros. with an RCA ribbon microphone and record one of these and just see how that sounds.

BM: So they’re not able to technically reproduce that acoustic today, then?

BB: Well, they’re able to do it. Whether they want to or not, or whether they go to the extreme to do that, I don’t know. See, we record the cartoons first. We’re not a part of the production. We’re not a part of the animation. We’re not a part of the sound mixing. So we just record our voices. How they decide the finished product will be, that is the discretion of the producers, not us, not the voice actors.

BM: I see. But I mean, speaking in general, can the producers take your recording and somehow technically create that acoustic in post-production?

BB: Of course. Of course. Look, they probably could somehow, but the best way to do it is to record it in identical spaces. They still have a few sound stages at Warner Bros., they could do this.

BM: In the new Looney Tunes, what would you say is your best performance?

BB: I don’t remember. We’ve done so many of them. I can tell you right now that one of my favorites—and Porky doesn’t even say that much—is one called Wet Cement, which is on YouTube right now. Curse of the Monkey Bird was fun. Well, we’ve done so many of them, and I’ve not seen that many of them. I will tell you that I leave every session with a smile on my face having had the best time.

BM: That’s great. Have you started receiving fan mail with the coming of the internet?

BB: Oh. Well, yeah. Oh, my gosh, every day. But I get written fan mail all the time, but I would say, throughout the day, I get emails from either fans or people interested in getting into voiceover, and I answer every single one.

BM: So the internet has made a big difference in actors getting feedback from the general public.

BB: Oh, yeah. Without a doubt. Also fan conventions. I remember when I went to my first San Diego Comic Con in the 90s. We don’t know people watch our stuff, let alone know who we are, and all of a sudden I’m walking through the exhibit hall and people are looking at me like my fly is open. And I’m saying, “What am I doing wrong? What’s going on? Oh, they recognize me,” which is odd for us.

I’ve got friends who are on-camera celebrities and they’re used to it. Voice actors, not so much, and there’s a nice thing about anonymity. If you’re not a well-known face, you can go to a restaurant or a restroom, and nobody pays attention or follows. But if you are an on-camera actor, you don’t have a lot of privacy. I like privacy, so I don’t mind being able to go to a restaurant and not being noticed. On the other hand, it’s really cool to be able to go to a fan convention and have people express gratitude that they like our work, they like the products. It’s fairly new for the voice actor. And again, with the internet, we’re accessible. Social media, Instagram, Twitter, where everybody talked, everybody shares.

BM: That’s fantastic. Do you have any final words?

BB: My final words are, on May 27th, tune in to HBO Max and watch Looney Tunes Cartoons. You will not be disappointed. [As Porky] That’s all folks!

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W.R. Miller

W.R. Miller - known informally as “Bob” – has written for Starlog, Comics Scene, Animation Magazine and Animation World Magazine. Bob has been involved in animation for two decades, as a writer, character animator, special effects animator, and storyboard artist - For more information about Bob, check his website: http://wrmilleronline.com/.

He has just completed Batman: The Animated Interviews, a five-volume work featuring the executives, producers, directors, writers, actors, designers, storyboard artists and composers involved with the making of Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs. BearManor Media is the publisher.