Clear component of blood / MON 8-18-25 / Stow away, big-time / Colorado Plateau natives / "I am ze locksmith of love, no?" speaker / Baked item whose name suggests how much of each ingredient to use

Constructor: Andrea Carla Michaels and Christina Iverson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Several voice roles of Mel Blanc 

Theme answers:

• DAFFY DUCK (18A: "You're despicable!" speaker voiced by Mel Blanc)
• ELMER FUDD (24A: "I'm hunting wabbits" speaker voiced by Mel Blanc)
• WOODY WOODPECKER (40A: "Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha!" speaker voiced by Mel Blanc)
• PEPE LE PEW (51A: "I am ze locksmith of love, no?" speaker voiced by Mel Blanc)
• BUGS BUNNY (62A: "What's up, Doc?" speaker voiced by Mel Blanc)

Word of the Day: PEPE LE PEW (51A) —

Pepé Le Pew is an animated character from the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons, introduced in 1945. Depicted as a French anthropomorphic striped skunk, Pepé is constantly on the quest for love and pursuit of romance but typically his skunk odor causes other characters to run away from him.

Although initially a feature character with his own series of shorts, Pepé has drawn in increasing accusations of harassing clearly unwilling women as a subject of humor. The female characters in his films often flee from him, and his behavior is often seen as a form of stalking and implied sexual assault. (wikipedia)

• • •

Was kind of hoping ... assuming, in fact ... that day was some important day in the life of Mel Blanc (you know, birthday, death day, something). But no. He was born May 30, 1908 and died July 10, 1989. So ... yeah, I don't get it. Is it a tight theme? Not particularly. It's just a list of some of his more famous roles. One of which is a sex pest skunk. In addition to the characters featured in the puzzle, Blanc voiced Tweety and Sylvester and Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam and Porky Pig and I don't know how many others. This is a decent set of names, but it's also very partial and at least somewhat arbitrary. Four of them are Looney Tunes, but WOODY WOODPECKER isn't, which makes the theme even looser than it could've been, although I guess it would be hard to lay off a perfect grid-spanning 15 like WOODY WOODPECKER. Still, if you're doing Woody—that is, if you're going beyond Looney Tunes characters—why not do Barney Rubble while you're at it? This theme is really looking for some reason to exist besides "here are some Mel Blanc voice roles." If you tried to do this with a live-action film actor ("here are some Tom Hanks roles"), you ... probably wouldn't have your puzzle accepted. Not tight enough. Not interesting enough. Perhaps there's some angle I'm missing here. These are really good constructors. I'm just missing the point of it all. The only thing I liked about the theme (besides the general good feeling I get from remembering some of these characters—rapey skunk excepted) is the winky, bonus Blanc at 28A: Mont Blanc, e.g. (ALP). 

The Downs-only solve was easy once I got DAFFY DUCK. From there, I could see that the letter pattern in the next themer (ending in two "D"s) almost certainly meant ELMER FUDD, and from there I needed only the tail end WOODY WOODPECKER to get it. As a visual aid, here's the tail end of WOODY WOODPECKER:

When you know you're hunting famous cartoon characters, then the themers pretty much reveal themselves with a few crosses. This means that all my struggle came up top, before the theme clicked into place. I couldn't think of what the [Clear component of blood] was and so wrote in PLASM (?) (instead of SERUM). I couldn't see THERAPY because ... well, that's a very generic answer. What kind of THERAPY? You mean *physical* THERAPY? Because that's what it's (generally) called (in a rehab context). The thing that threw me the most, though, was the phrase "Stow away" in 6D: Stow away, big-time (HOARD). "Stow away" is what you do on a boat when you don't want to (or can't) pay your fare. Having recently finished watching the entire run of The Love Boat, I feel like an expert on this subject. It's the "away" part that's messing things up. If you "stow" lots of things in your house, then you're a HOARDer. But if you "stow away, big time," I assume you are just really good at hiding on boats, or else you stowed away on, like, the best boat. Like the QEII (now a floating hotel in Dubai!?)

My [Pained cry] was an "OUCH!" and a "YEOW!" before it was a "YIPE!," which seems more a surprised cry, to me (19D: Pained cry). I got my OTOS and my UTES confused again, but sorting it out wasn't too hard (30D: Colorado Plateau natives). I had to hunt down a typo/error at the end because somehow, in the early confusion of trying to gain a Downs-only foothold, I thought -CP looked better than -LP as a possible Across answer (PCP?) and so wrote in NFC instead of NFL at 21D: Falcons' and Eagles' org. I was right, too. Those teams are both in the NFC. But I was wrong, of course, as ALP > ACP for 28A: Mont Blanc, e.g. 

Bullets:

• 5A: Breakfast chain that punnily used a kangaroo in its early commercials (IHOP) — I love when crosswordese clues contain lore. If you're gonna give me the answer I've seen a million times before, tell me something I don't know! I vaguely remember the kangaroo days of IHOP. I've talked before about collecting all the NFL helmet magnets from IHOP in the late '70s. I remember the restaurant had an iconic vaulted roof. Let's see if I can find the iconic kangaroo... omg did they really do a parody of R. Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" Looks like they did. This looks sooooo familiar that I have to believe I saw it before I ever knew the comics icon being referenced

[Promotional stickers, I remember these!]

• 44A: Newspaper opinion piece (OP-ED) — your regular reminder (for those who need it) that the "OP" in OP-ED does not stand for "opinion" (it stands for "opposite," as in "OPposite the EDitorial page")
• 10D: Baked item whose name suggests how much of each ingredient to use (POUND CAKE) — one pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. So ... a four-POUND CAKE.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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