 LOS
ANGELES (Reuters) - Paul Winchell, a famed ventriloquist best remembered
as the voice of the irrepressible Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh series,
has died, an associate said on Sunday. He was 82.
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- Winchell died on Friday in the Los Angeles area, according
associate Johnny Blue Star and a Web site operated by Winchell's daughter,
the actress April Winchell.
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- Winchell was a fixture in American children's television
in the 1950s and 1960s in a string of shows featuring him giving voice
to the sidekicks he created and made famous, the dummies Jerry Mahoney
and Knucklehead Smiff.
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- But it was his voice work on a wide range of cartoons
and animated features that captivated a later generation of viewers, including
turns as Gargamel of "The Smurfs," Dick Dastardly of "Wacky
Races" and Fleegle on "The Banana Splits Adventure Hour."
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- Winchell was most famous for his voicing to the hyperkinetic
Tigger in a series of appearances in Walt Disney Co. Winnie the Pooh productions
for over three decades beginning in 1968.
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- He won a Grammy in 1974 for "Winnie the Pooh and
Tigger Too," including the movie's signature song "The Wonderful
Thing about Tiggers."
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- On the award-winning soundtrack, Winchell gives a throaty,
bouncy rendition to the memorable lyric: "The wonderful thing about
tiggers, is tiggers are wonderful things! Their tops are made out of rubber,
their bottoms are made out of springs!"
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- Jerry Mahoney, who began with an appearance in a 1936
radio audition, was inspired by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sidekick,
Charlie McCarthy, Winchell said.
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- In 1986, Winchell won a nearly $18 million verdict against
Metromedia Inc., which he claimed destroyed the only surviving tapes of
his "Winchell Mahoney Time" children's show from the mid-1960s
after a dispute over ownership rights.
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- Born in New York City in 1922, Winchell devoted energy
in his later years to pursuits like publishing on Christian theology and
promoting fish farming in Africa, said Johnny Blue Star, who collaborated
in a screenplay based on the autobiography "Winch."
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- Winchell was also an inventor with a patent for a prototype
artificial heart he built in the 1960s in the same workshop in which he
created his ventriloquist dummies, Blue Star said. He also created an "invisible"
garter belt, a flameless cigarette lighter and an early version of the
disposable razor.
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- "He was more or less a self-taught renaissance man,"
he said.
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- (Reporting by Paritosh Bansal in Los Angeles)
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- © Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
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