TV Talk: Voice actor appearing at Steel City Con credits his career to meeting a celebrity at Pitt
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There will be famous actors galore at Steel City Con, April 12-14 at the Monroeville Convention Center, including Geena Davis, Molly Ringwald, Ernie Hudson and the cast of “Beverly Hills 90210,” but one guest in particular returns to Pittsburgh with memories of the city as the place he met a celebrated talent who changed the course of his life and career.
Jeff Bergman, a 1983 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, voices Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Barney Rubble and a host of other classic cartoon characters. But he’s not the first voice actor to play those roles — the late Mel Blanc originated them all.
Bergman recalled that when he was a speech and rhetorical communication major, Blanc visited the Pitt campus.
Bergman attended Blanc’s appearance in David Lawrence Hall — he said it was a standing-room-only crowd — and a reception afterward at the student union. Bergman overheard that Blanc was staying at the Crossgates Inn and found out his room number. At 10 p.m., he knocked on Blanc’s door.
“He let me in, and we talked for three-quarters of an hour,” Bergman said. “Him not being a college graduate, he understood the value of education and he said, ‘Jeff, I realize you’re maybe not the best student in the world, but stay in school, get your degree and look me up if you get out to California and keep at it.’”
Bergman never saw Blanc again before Blanc’s death in 1989, but their meeting at Pitt gave Bergman, who previously did voices and impersonations for fun, the impetus to pursue his career.
“He couldn’t have been more inspiring,” Bergman said. “Sometimes just to be with somebody — there we were, sitting on those twin beds in that motel, and it’s the guy who voices Bugs Bunny and Barney Rubble, looking right at me. That really changed everything. After I met Mel, I went into the trenches and really started to hone that craftsmanship of building an archive of voices. When you meet somebody or read about somebody that does what you want to do, it sort of authenticates the fact that it’s possible.”
Several weeks after Blanc died on Bergman’s birthday, Warner Bros. had a casting call for “Tiny Toon Adventures,” which premiered in 1990. Bergman was tapped to voice multiple characters, including Bugs Bunny.
In the years since, Bergman has voiced dozens of characters in the Warner Bros. stable and beyond (he was the original voice of Gus the Groundhog in Pennsylvania Lottery commercials).
His current projects include “Tiny Toons Looniversity” on Max and Cartoon Network (as Bugs, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester and others); “Jellystone” on Max (as Yogi Bear and others); and he took over the voice of Odin from Sir Anthony Hopkins in Marvel’s animated “What If…” series and will debut as a second MCU character in the show’s third season. Bergman is also now the voice of Harry Potter’s Dumbledore in video games and Universal Studios theme park attractions.
Bergman’s appearance at Steel City Con — he’ll be there all three days — marks his first time appearing at a Pittsburgh con. He plans to also visit the Pitt campus to confirm with his own eyes that The O is gone, and he might pop into the campus radio station, now WPTS Radio, where he got his start.
He’ll likely come back from the trip with stories that he’ll share with his friends, including Mel Blanc’s son, whom he first met at his “Tiny Toon Adventures” callback some 30 years ago. They didn’t reconnect until two years ago when Bergman learned Noel Blanc lived five minutes away.
“Now we are pals like crazy,” Bergman said. “We became really good friends, and our wives became really good friends.”
‘Fallout’
HBO’s “The Last of Us” set a high bar for video game adaptations, and, while Amazon Prime Video’s “Fallout” lacks the narrative sophistication of its prestige TV counterpart, “Fallout” works well enough as a companion series to Prime’s “The Boys.” Both shows balance gory action-adventure with dark comedic satire.
Set on an alternate Earth where ’50s and ’60s aesthetics reigned until nuclear destruction in 2077, “Fallout,” now streaming all eight episodes, begins 219 years after the blast as elites live in underground vaults, awaiting a time when it’s safe to return to the planet’s surface.
Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan, “Twin Peaks”), overseer of Vault 33, prepares for the wedding of daughter Lucy (Ella Purnell) to a young man, sight unseen, from a neighboring vault.
Things go sideways, and soon Lucy is on the surface encountering all manner of creatures in the topside’s broken-down society, including The Ghoul (Walton Goggins, “The Shield”), a gunslinger whose backstory is more interesting than the wasteland battles that dominate the first half of the season.
Flashbacks that fill in the blanks of how The Ghoul came to be are more compelling, especially in the sixth episode, which gets more into how society devolved, why the vaults were built and why the bombs were dropped.
But there’s a lot of wandering around before the show gets to that. Viewers’ enjoyment of “Fallout” may depend on their tolerance for the fetch-quest story that makes up the bulk of the first season.
Prime Video has not announced a second season order for “Fallout,” but clearly the service intends to renew the show: Season two will relocate from New York to California after getting $25 million in California film tax credits. Upcoming Pittsburgh-set medical drama “THE PITT,” executive produced by Carnegie Mellon University grad John Wells, will also film in California, thanks to a $12.2 million California film tax credit.
Channel surfing
CBS renewed “NCIS” and “The Neighborhood” for the 2024-25 TV season. … “WrestleMania XL” on Peacock last weekend was Peacock’s second highest-usage weekend of all time, trailing only the NFL wild card game earlier this year. … Hallmark Mystery ordered two new “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” movies to premiere in 2024 and 2025 reuniting cast members Eric Mabius, Kristin Booth, Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe and Geoff Gustafson. …”Jeopardy! Masters,” featuring Point Breeze’s Victoria Groce, will premiere at 8 p.m. May 1 on ABC and continue airing at 8 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday from May 6 through 22.