TVSquad

Toon Zone has reported that Lennie Weinrib passed away on Wednesday at his home in Chile. He was 71-years-old. You may not recognize the name, although he wrote for and performed in numerous television series for over 40 years. However, if you were a child of the 1960's, 70's or 80's you would probably recognize him as the voice of numerous Saturday morning cartoon characters that you loved, including H.R. Pufnstuf and Scrappy-Doo.

Lennie began his television career as an actor in various shows such as Peter Gunn, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Burke's Law. His first voice work was for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Jetsons back in 1962. Seven years later he became the voice of H.R. Pufnstuf for the Sid and Marty Krofft show of the same name.

After that his voice career took off. In addition to Pufnstuf and Scrappy-Doo he was the voice of Moonrock on The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Show, Inch High on Inch High, Private Eye, and good guy Hunk and bad guy Lotor on Voltron. He was also an additional voice in cartoons like The New Adventures of Batman (where he voiced Commissioner and most of the villains), Jabberjaw, and The Smurfs.

Writer Mark Evanier has a very nice tribute to Weinrib on his website.

I've always wondered how the Onion A.V. Club comes up with their off-the-wall Inventory lists. Do they come up with the concepts in editorial meetings, or do the writers just individually conjure these lists off the tops of their heads, like we do? Either way, some of the categories they come up with are funny and conversation-worthy to say the least.

Case in point: this week, the A.V. Club folks list "13 Memorably Unpopular Characters from Popular TV", and the list is right-on-target: I mean, who didn't hate Cousin Oliver, or pull the hairs out of their nose every time Scrappy-Doo came on the screen? Urkel also makes the list, although there are about 133 people who may dispute that claim. Even the choice of Dawn Summers is spot-on, as I confirmed with our resident Buffy-phile, Keith, this morning. Those Onion guys can come up with some pretty good lists. They're almost as good as ours.