Sputtering, spitting, spraying and stuttering, Mel Blanc sits on the couch in his son's Beverly Hills, Calif., home.

In 1961, encased in a full body cast after an automobile accident, Blanc listed all the radio and movie cartoon voices he had created -- more than 400.

The number is closer to 1,000 now, including Jack Benny's wheezing Maxwell automobile ("P-tui, p-tui, b-lit, b-lit, p-tui") and Fred Flintstone's Speedy Buggy.

He is responsible for 500 barnyard animals and assorted human beings in Warner Bros. cartoons alone, including Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety Bird.

He says a doctor put a camera down his throat to gaze at his larynx and said the only thing close to Blanc's musculature was in the throat of Enrico Caruso.

Now, a few months past his 80th birthday, Blanc is being seen as well as heard. He has just published his autobiography, That's Not All, Folks (Warner Books).

And he stole the show this fall when the New York Film Festival opened with a new Warner Bros. cartoon, Night of the Living Duck, with Blanc as the voice of Daffy Duck.

Wearing a shirt with a Bugs Bunny patch on the pocket, the rumpled black-and- white checked suit of a vaudeville comic and blue Reeboks, Blanc twists his tongue into an album of voices.

Bugs Bunny: "My favorite. They told me the character was a real little stinker, tough. He had to have a tough small voice because he was a small character.

"What was the toughest accent I knew? Brooklyn and the Bronx. So I put the two of them together. Bugs is so popular because other men would like to do what he does but don't have the guts."

Daffy Duck: "He had a long beak so I knew he'd have trouble speaking. He was crazy and totally jealous of Bugs, who outshines him."

Sylvester: "The easiest because he's my natural voice with a spray put on it. Thuffering thuccotash."

Yosemite Sam: "He's so short you have to give him a voice that will get him noticed immediately. He's the most difficult because it's so hard on the throat."

"God gave Dad vocal cords of incredible durability," says his son, Noel, who is his manager. Blanc smoked at least one pack of cigarettes a day from the time he was 9 until he was 77, he says. He ended up with emphysema, stopped smoking and regained control of his throat.

Like Barbra Streisand or Judy Garland, Blanc has what his son calls a cutting edge. "His voice cuts through anything else," Noel says. That edge makes it difficult for other voices to play against Mel Blanc in a cartoon.

A few years ago, ABC held blind auditions for a new animated series by numbering the contestants. Blanc was the winner for all five voices.

Noel Blanc is heir to his father's characters because Warner Bros., having put all its eggs in one larynx, demanded that Blanc train someone to take over the menagerie. "When I kick off ...," Blanc says, trading a "What's up, Doc?" with his son.

He much prefers being an invisible star, he says. His experience with bit roles in such movies as Neptune's Daughter with Esther Williams and TV programs such as The Jack Benny Show made him uncomfortable.

"You could be only one person on a television show," he said. In radio, his favorite medium, "I could be eight or 10 different voices, and nobody would know who I was."

On a typical Sunday night in the 1940s, he would perform on The Jack Benny Program as Carmichael, the polar bear who guarded Benny's basement safe, then he would race over to The Great Gildersleeve, Baby Snooks and Blondie.

Later in the week he might be Pedro ("Pardon me for talking een your face, senorita") on The Judy Canova Show, the sad postman on Burns and Allen, a dour Scotsman on Abbott and Costello and a friend on Amos 'n' Andy.