Creativity Quote by John Kricfalusi

Mel Blanc has been dead for three decades, yet his voice keeps turning up like a rerun you can never quite escape. John Kricfalusi’s line lands because it’s both tribute and gripe, the kind of backhanded reverence artists use when they’re talking about a craft so definitive it becomes a gatekeeping ghost.

Blanc wasn’t just a performer; he was an infrastructure. Bugs, Daffy, Porky - a whole studio’s emotional register ran through one throat. So “still around” isn’t mystical. It’s syndication, sampling, sound libraries, impersonators, and the corporate habit of treating voices like interchangeable assets. Kricfalusi, a notoriously prickly animation purist, is really talking about how animation gets stuck: the medium canonizes a particular rhythm of comedy, a particular sound of personality, then spends decades trying to reproduce it rather than risk a new grammar.

The cleverness is the slight grammatical shrug in “even though,” as if death is just another production delay. That’s the subtext: in commercial art, mortality doesn’t end a performance - ownership does. Blanc’s continued “presence” becomes an indictment of how entertainment industries recycle what’s bankable, polishing the familiar until it feels like culture is moving when it’s actually looping.

Coming from Kricfalusi, it also reads as self-aware jealousy and admiration: he built his career on pushing against the safe, post-Warner blandness, yet he’s acknowledging the impossible benchmark. Blanc is gone, and the business still won’t let him leave.