ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Monday, October 21, 1996               TAG: 9610230010
SECTION: NEWSFUN                  PAGE: NF-1 EDITION: METRO 

SO?!!

If you're a cartoon fan, you might be interested in knowing. . .

Why does the Road Runner always say, ``Beep-beep?''

The cartoonists at Warner Bros., liked to make each character special. So when they made Road Runner in the 1940s, they made it super fast with only one thing to say. The idea for ``Beep-beep'' came from a habit of a Warner Bros. artist, Paul Jullian. When he walked down the hall carrying a big stack of artwork, he couldn't see where he was going. So he warned people by saying, ``Beep-beep.''

In the first Road Runner cartoon, in 1949, the beeps were done with an electronic horn. But legendary voice-man Mel Blanc mimicked the horn for the next cartoon, in 1952. His beeps were taped once, and used over and over in later cartoons.

When was the character Bugs Bunny born?

Bugs Bunny will be 55 in June. But he keeps hopping around just as spryly as he did in his youth when he made his debut in a cartoon called ``A Wild Hare.'' Mel Blanc, the voice of ``that cwazy wabbit,'' as Elmer Fudd liked to call Bugs Bunny, died in 1989. But Bugs Bunny lives on, still asking the next generation the same question he has been asking for half a century: ``What's up, Doc?''

LENGTH: Short :   31 lines

































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