Since Mel Blanc passed away in 1989, a tag team of top voice actors has provided the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and the rest of the Looney Tunes mob. Whereas Disney has more-or-less designated certain actors for long periods to voice The Mouse, The Duck and all their other recurring characters, the folks who control the Warners characters choose to keep things flexible. The actors who follow in Mel's footsteps or maybe his tonsils often have to audition for individual projects even though they've voiced those particular characters often in the past. At one point, the late Greg Burson told me he'd voiced Bugs over fifty times and auditioned to voice Bugs at least a hundred times.
Why don't they do what Disney does? I've heard two reasons and both could be true. One is that they don't want any actor to think they have a lock on being a certain character's voice. They might think they could demand more money. It was apparently a sore spot with certain folks at the studio that when they needed Mel Blanc's services in his last years, he charged them an awful lot of that green stuff. One exec there I knew always used to vent to me about how much they had to pay Mel for their latest project. He didn't like it when I said, "Good for Mel!" It helped make up for Mr. Blanc not being paid a peso when they ran a vintage Speedy Gonzales cartoon for the nine-jillionth time. (That exec, by the way, is long gone but tales of Mel's demands endure.)
And the other reason was that different people were in charge of different projects that required the voice of Bugs, the voice of Elmer, the voice of Tweety (etc.) and they all had different opinions on how those characters should sound. I crossed paths with one producer there who was put in charge of a Bugs Bunny project and was determined to prove that he and he alone knew how Bugs should sound, how Bugs should be written, how Bugs should be drawn and so forth. His working premise was that everyone in charge of a Bugs Bunny project before him hadn't known Bugs the way he knew Bugs…so he wasn't going to use anyone they'd employed. He launched a search for a new Bugs voice actor, did extensive auditions and wound up hiring one of the guys who'd voiced the wabbit many, many times for his predecessors.
Are you interested in who all those insufficiently-celebrated actors are or were? Someone has compiled this list of who spoke for each character. It doesn't cover every job that someone has had speaking for those characters. For instance, it doesn't cover record albums or merchandise. One day while we were recording the voices for a Garfield and Friends episode, Joe Alaskey was in the studio next to ours recording the voice of Yosemite Sam for a G.P.S. He was there several days yelling thousands of street names and driving instructions and going home each day quite hoarse. Things like that aren't on this list.
Joe passed away in 2016 and Greg Burson left us in 2008 — two very talented men who usually did uncanny Mel simulations. Both used to demonstrate the different ways they could do Bugs Bunny — the 1940's Bugs versus the way Mel did him in the sixties, for example. I remember Joe demonstrating five different versions of Daffy's voice that appeared in Mel-voiced cartoons over the years. It's never been and probably never will be an easy job. I salute all the folks on the linked list who've been able to do it. I certainly could never do it…although there was one time when I had a real bad flu and at its peak, I sounded exactly like the Tasmanian Devil for an hour or two.