In 1961, after a head-on collision on Sunset Boulevard, Mel Blanc lay in a coma for about two weeks. Doctors got no response until one leaned in and asked how Bugs Bunny was feeling. A weak voice answered, and then Tweety chimed in. This episode uses that documented moment to explore how the pioneer of modern voice acting built a physical instrument so deeply grooved into his brain that his characters could pull him back to consciousness.

The conversation follows Blanc from a teacher's insult that prompted him to change the spelling of his name, through vaudeville and a stint as the country's youngest orchestra conductor, to the Jack Benny Program where he improvised the sound of a broken-down Maxwell with his throat. It covers his arrival at Leon Schlesinger Productions in 1936, the anatomy of his unusually thick vocal cords, the raw carro ...