Many kids today know him as the voice of Tigger in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh cartoons. Heart patients know him as a man who helped prolonged many of their lives.
Kids raised in the 50s and 60s remember the magic he created on his kids’ show. Those who were parents in the 50s and 60s remember him as was a world-class novelty act — and a ventriloquist who never moved his lips. And to ventriloquists everywhere (like me) he was one of the last surviving “greats” of a once highly visible comedy art form. Paul Winchell has died at 82:
LOS ANGELES – Paul Winchell, a noted ventriloquist, inventor and longtime voice of Tigger in animated versions of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” has died. He was 82.
Winchell died early Friday morning in his sleep at his Moorpark home, Burt Du Brow, a television producer and close family friend, told the Los Angeles Times.
Over six decades, Winchell parlayed his talent for creating countless voices from the earliest days of television to film. Outside of his career in entertainment, Winchell also was an inventor who held 30 patents, including one for an early artificial heart he built in 1963.
But he was perhaps best known for his work as the voice of the lovable animated tiger
Winchell first voiced Tigger in 1968 for Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day,” which won an Academy Award for best animated short film, and continued to do so through 1999’s “Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving.”
In 1974, he earned a Grammy for best children’s recording with “The Most Wonderful Things About Tiggers” from the feature “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too.”
“I first met Walt Disney 25 or 30 years ago,” Winchell recalled in a 1988 interview with The Associated Press. “He said, ‘We’re both in the same business. I use cartoons and you use dummies and we both entertain children.’ That was long before I started working here. Walt gave me a VIP tour of the studio. I remember people doing voices. I said, ‘Gee, that must be fun.’ And here I am.”
Winchell said he always tried to look for characteristics and idiosyncrasies in the voices he created. For Tigger, he created a slight lisp and a laugh. He credited his wife, who is British, for giving him the inspiration for Tigger’s signature phrase: TTFN. TA-TA for now.
Winchell also voiced memorable characters in many other animated features over the years for Disney and Hanna Barbera. He was Gargamel in “The Smurfs,” and Boomer in “The Fox and the Hound.”
But before he began working on cartoons, Winchell emerged as a master ventriloquist, captivating children while bringing dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff to life on television…..
Winchell made his television debut in 1947 with a smart-mouthed puppet he had invented in his early teens and within a year was host of “The Bigelow Show.” He was also host of a number of children’s shows, including “The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Show” and “Circus Time.”
Despite his success in television, Winchell felt the medium did not do justice to his beloved craft of ventriloquism.
“Ventriloquism today is in a slump. Children today haven’t been exposed to it,” he told the AP in 1988. “Edgar Bergen was an enormous hit in radio. But I think television defeats ventriloquism. Children are so used to seeing puppets that when they see a real ventriloquist they don’t understand it. On television, everyone talks and they don’t care about the mechanics.”
In 1950, Winchell created Knucklehead Smiff and introduced him on “The Spiedel Show,” which later became “What’s My Name?” Winchell’s popularity earned him invitations to other variety programs of the era, including “The Lucy Show” and “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.”
This AP piece gives some more bio, then notes:
Winchell attended Columbia University and also studied and practiced acupuncture and hypnosis.
He donated his artificial heart to the University of Utah for research. Dr. Robert Jarvik and other researchers at the university went on to build an artificial heart, dubbed the Jarvik-7, which was implanted into patients after 1982.
Among Winchell’s other patents: a disposable razor, a flameless cigarette lighter and an invisible garter belt.
MY PERSONAL STORY: If it wasn’t for Paul Winchell I wouldn’t be doing shows all over the country in my other non-blogging incarnation.
In 1988 I wrote Paul Winchell because I was a full-time newspaper reporter and although I felt that doing news was great, I didn’t feel like I was putting enough into the world.
I wanted to do something for sick kids at Children’s Hospital. So I got a little book on ventriloquism and began practicing in front of a mirror and one day I wanted to get a dummy. But where could I begin?
I was an autograph collector then (I sold most of them later to finance my ventriloquism characters) and wrote Winchell telling him that I wanted to entertain children who were ill and wanted to buy a dummy but didn’t know where.
He wrote me back sending me a photo with a personal letter — and both are framed and on my wall in my office here. It read:
Dear Joe Gandelman
I’d be happy to send the photo you wanted so find it enclosed.
For a pro-vent figure forget toy stores and try magic shops or distributors. Magicians are generally vents and vice versa. If no success, contact Vent Haven Museum, they will give you the info you seek. Sorry I don’t have the address but its in Kentucky. Good luck; your desire to entertain kids in hospitals is super — your visits will be their own reward.
Winch
It was enough to encourage me…and made me realize it wasn’t such an outlandish idea. That’s what got me started. And later another ventriloquism great, Jimmy Nelson, the last surviving legendary ventriloquist, saw a video I did, critiqued it for me and encouraged me to go full time.
And, today, even though I’m always on the run and driving and flying to do shows at all kinds of venues, I operate underneath the mass media’s and even the ventriloquism community’s radar.
But, then, in recent years, his 1950s, 1960s fame from the newly dominant television behind him, Paul Winchell did his voices, created his inventions, quietly talked to and met with ventriloquists….all underneath the radar.
For, you see, when the radar picked him up, it picked up Paul Winchell doing wonderful things…and when it didn’t pick him up, he just kept on doing wonderful things.
The radar was less important than the wonderful things.
UPDATE:
— Make sure you read this.
—skippy the bush kangaroo notes that he was one of Winchell’s biggest fans in all of blogtopia…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.