Paul Winchell
Paul Winchell is an actor, born 1922.
A ventriloquist by trade, Paul Winchell spent the 1950s and 1960s as one of the most visible faces on American television. He hosted The Paul Winchell Show from 1950 to 1954, a prime time NBC run that also went out under two other titles, The Speidel Show and What's My Name?, and he came back to children's television from 1965 to 1968 with Winchell-Mahoney Time. The Mahoney in that title was Jerry Mahoney, the dummy, who was at least as famous as the man working him.
What outlasted the live shows was the voice, or rather the several voices. Winchell had an elastic, slightly cracked instrument that animators could build a whole character around, and from the late 1960s he worked mostly in a recording booth. Disney gave him Tigger, and the Tigger credits here run from the 1968 featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day all the way to a 2003 release, taking in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore and Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin on the way. The bounce in that performance is entirely his: a rasp, a giggle, and a habit of finishing sentences a note higher than he started them.
Hanna-Barbera hired the other Winchell, the wheedling one. He was Dick Dastardly in Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines and kept that voice going through later revivals such as Yogi's Treasure Hunt, and he was Gargamel on The Smurfs, a role that consists of losing every week to small blue creatures. Elsewhere he is Clyde in Wacky Races, Zummi Gummi in Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Boomer in The Fox and the Hound and Dr. Input in The Jetsons. He died in 2005.
Movies (10)
- The Aristocats (1970)
- The Fox and the Hound (1981)
- The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
- Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving (1999)
- Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin (1997)
- Winnie the Pooh: A Very Merry Pooh Year (2002)
- The Magical World of Winnie the Pooh: A Great Day of Discovery (2003)
- Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore (1983)
- Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968)
- Winnie the Pooh & Christmas Too (1991)
TV (20)
- The Smurfs (1981)
- Garfield and Friends (1988)
- What's My Line? (1950)
- The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1988)
- Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears (1985)
- Lights Out (1949)
- Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines (1969)
- The Jetsons (1962)
- The Dean Martin Show (1965)
- Droopy, Master Detective (1993)
- Heathcliff (1980)
- Wacky Races (1968)
- Joe Forrester (1975)
- Hong Kong Phooey (1974)
- Wake, Rattle, and Roll (1990)
- Spider-Man (1981)
- The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1969)
- Fender Bender 500 (1990)
- Yogi's Treasure Hunt (1985)
- The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968)
Where to start with Paul Winchell
Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day is the place to begin, because it is the earliest Tigger credit here and the voice arrives fully formed, with none of the softening that later versions of the character picked up. If you would rather have it inside a proper feature, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh folds that featurette into the larger film.
For the other Winchell, the one who plays villainy as pure whining self-regard, go to Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Nothing in the format changes from week to week, which is the joke, and his line readings do all the work of keeping it upright. The Smurfs points the same instrument at a much bigger audience and blunts it slightly, while Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears is worth hearing for how differently he pitches Zummi: fussy and old rather than sly.
Leave The Fox and the Hound until last. Boomer is a small part with no edge to it at all, and it is the one performance here where he is simply being kind.