Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger in "Winnie the Pooh" features for more than three decades and a versatile ventriloquist who became a fixture in early children's television along with his dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, has died. He was 82.
Winchell died early Friday in his sleep at his home in Moorpark, Burt Du Brow, a television producer and close family friend, said Saturday.
Although he was a legendary ventriloquist and built a career attracting legions of followers of that dwindling art, Winchell's most durable legacy may be his rich voice as Tigger and other animated characters on television and in motion pictures.
Winchell obituary -- An obituary in Sunday's California section of ventriloquist and voice artist Paul Winchell misspelled the name of one of his early television programs, "The Speidel Show," as "The Spiedel Show."
He became the lovable Tigger in 1968 for Disney's "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day," which earned an Academy Award for best animated short film. Winchell continued to voice A.A. Milne's imaginative little tiger on television and the big screen through "Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving" in 1999. In recent years, Jim Cummings has voiced Tigger as well as Pooh.
Winchell earned a Grammy in 1974 for the best children's recording with "The Most Wonderful Things About Tiggers" from the feature "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too." In addition, he was nominated for an Annie award for the 1998 animated feature-length "Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin."
It was Winchell, crediting his British-born wife, who came up with Tigger's signature phrase "TTFN," or "Ta-ta for now."
The entertainer also has been heard as Gargamel in "The Smurfs," as Dick Dastardly in Hanna Barbera cartoons, including "Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines," and as Boomer in Disney's "The Fox and the Hound," among many others.
During a career spanning more than six decades, Winchell saw television evolve from his best asset to something of a nemesis for ventriloquists.
"Television and its use of computers can make everything talk, so there's no need for the art of ventriloquism anymore," he told The Times in 1998. "I don't think young kids today would even understand it."
Yet it was television that dramatically showcased Winchell's art.
By the time he published his book "Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit" in 1954, he had built a base of ready buyers.
Winchell debuted on NBC in 1947 with "The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Show," featuring a smart-mouthed puppet he had invented in his early teens. The budding ventriloquist had introduced Jerry in 1936 on radio's "Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour," earning first prize.
