Study acting, advises Scarborough-raised man who voices Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and other animated characters

By the time Eric Bauza got to Scarborough’s Cardinal Newman Catholic High School, his voice impressions of teachers were becoming spot on.

“The more laughs you get, you know you’re doing it right,” he said.

Years of studiously watching Saturday morning cartoons, “SCTV,” and Billy Van’s characters on “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein” made Bauza a proficient class clown in the 1990s.

“I think the kids loved it, but the adults were, ‘Hey, hand in your homework,’” the Emmy Award-winning voice actor remembered in an interview last month

His south Scarborough school, now called St. John Henry Newman Catholic High School, encouraged Bauza’s creativity, letting him read the morning announcements as Beavis and Butthead, for instance.

“I was the valedictorian. My report card says otherwise, but they wanted to be entertained that year.”

Bauza, 43, graduated Centennial College in 2000 and has done voices for “GI Joe,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” (other shows he watched as a child) as well as for dozens of other characters in animated series and films.

But he’s always carried a torch for Bugs Bunny from “Looney Tunes,” the century-spanning cartoons Bauza said he never missed as a child. “I’ve been practising that voice my entire life,” he said.

Bauza — who auditioned for the role 10 years before he got it — said there’s a photograph somewhere of him in Grade 8, his teeth in braces, wearing a buttoned shirt with Bugs on the front.

And now, he’s the character’s current voice, he said, slipping into it: “Is dat weird?”

It was Bauza’s work as the rascally Bugs and others in the “Looney Tunes” “deck of cards” — Daffy Duck, Marvin the Martian and Tweety, to name a few — that got him a Children’s and Family Emmy for Outstanding Voice Performance in an Animated Program.

Bauza, naturally, has tried to watch everything by Mel Blanc, “the blueprint, the original” for “Looney Tunes,” including radio programs the voice artist did in his natural voice. He marvelled Blanc’s warm base could shift into a “nasally high-pitched Brooklyn-Bronx-type rabbit.”

Voice work isn’t as easy as some think. Bauza’s advice to those who want to be the next Stimpy or Lego Luke Skywalker is to study acting, because good impressions aren’t enough.

Bauza’s parents emigrated from the Philippines. Scarborough, he said, will always be his “forever home” and he hopes to make people there proud.

“I was in the suburbs and loved it,” he said on Zoom from Los Angeles, where he lives now. “There’s so much of Scarborough that I take with me.”

Viewers can hear some of Bauza’s most popular work on “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” “Bugs Bunny Builders” and “King Tweety” on Teletoon Plus.

What would he like to do next? Maybe create his own show, Bauza said.