Chuck McCann

Chuck McCann: The Voice You Know and the Face You Don't

"I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!" is very likely the most-heard sentence of Chuck McCann's career, and almost nobody could name the man saying it. He was Sonny the Cuckoo Bird for General Mills, Duckworth the butler on *DuckTales*, the Thing in *Fantastic Four*, and the over-caffeinated neighbour hollering "Hi, guy!" in Right Guard commercials. Before all of that he was something rarer: a live children's television host in New York who worked without a net, for hours at a stretch, with a puppet on his arm.

Brooklyn Showbusiness Stock

McCann was born on 2 September 1934 in Brooklyn, the son of Valentine J. McCann and Viola Hennessy, and he came by the trade honestly — his grandfather had performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West. His professional career is dated from 1944, when he was nine, and ran to 2017, better than seventy years. At twelve he founded a Laurel and Hardy fan club, an act of childhood devotion that turns out to be the through-line of his whole life rather than a curiosity.

Live From New York, With Puppets

McCann's formative work was local children's television, an unforgiving format now almost extinct. Working with the puppeteer Paul Ashley, he hosted comedy-variety puppet shows until 1975 across three New York stations: *The Puppet Hotel* on WNTA Channel 13; *Laurel & Hardy & Chuck*, *Let's Have Fun* and *The Chuck McCann Show* on WPIX Channel 11, where he also co-hosted the rock showcase *The Clay Cole Show*; and on WNEW Channel 5 another *Chuck McCann Show*, plus *The Great Bombo's Magic Cartoon Circus Luncheon Show* and a *Laurel and Hardy Show*. He had earlier appeared on *Captain Kangaroo* and *The Sandy Becker Show*. The job meant filling airtime in front of children, largely improvised, in character, live. A generation of New Yorkers grew up with him, which is why his death produced obituaries describing him as a legendary kids' TV host rather than as a voice actor.

The Films

His first substantial film role came in 1968 in *The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter*, a serious picture in which the professional clown was asked to play something else entirely. *The Projectionist* followed in 1971. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and worked constantly: *Herbie Rides Again* (1974), *Foul Play* (1978), *They Went That-A-Way & That-A-Way* (1978) opposite Tim Conway, *Cameron's Closet* (1988), and two Mel Brooks pictures, *Robin Hood: Men in Tights* (1993) and *Dracula: Dead and Loving It* (1995). On television he turned up on *Bonanza*, *Columbo*, *Kojak*, *The Rockford Files*, *The Bob Newhart Show*, *Starsky & Hutch*, *Little House on the Prairie* and, decades later, *Boston Legal*. He co-created and co-starred with Bob Denver in *Far Out Space Nuts* (1975), and played Kris Kringle on *Santa Barbara* in 1987 and 1988. He was also in George Schlatter's short-lived, notorious *Turn-On*.

The Second Career

Animation is where McCann's range became a business asset. On *DuckTales* he voiced Duckworth along with Burger Beagle and Bouncer Beagle across fifty-seven episodes — three distinct characters in one show, which is the voice actor's equivalent of a card trick performed slowly. He was the Thing in the 1994 *Fantastic Four* for twenty-six episodes, Blizzard in *Iron Man*, the Amoeba Boys on *The Powerpuff Girls* and again in the 2016 reboot, Heff Heffalump in Disney's *The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh*, Blinky and Pinky on *Pac-Man*, and Number One, The Owl and Tom McCool on *Cool McCool*. Add *TaleSpin*, *Garfield and Friends*, Mayor Grafton on *The Garfield Show*, *Adventure Time*, Disney's Journey Into Imagination attraction, and the commercial work — Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, and the Right Guard neighbour opposite Bill Fiore — and the shape of the career is clear. He was heard far more than he was seen.

Keeper of the Laurel and Hardy Flame

The fan club he started at twelve grew up with him. He performed Oliver Hardy impressions, including in commercials, built television shows around the duo, and in 1965 co-founded the Sons of the Desert with the biographer John McCabe — the worldwide appreciation society for Laurel and Hardy's work, which still exists. He appeared on the bestselling early-1960s LP *The First Family*, the Kennedy parody record, and belonged to Yarmy's Army, the comedians' group formed in support of Dick Yarmy during his illness. In 2017 he was making a comedy podcast.

Why Chuck Is Called a Genius

The claim, such as it is, rests on craft — specifically vocal and physical plasticity — and not on intellect, and it deserves an honest accounting of what the craft actually involves. A voice actor at McCann's level must generate multiple characters that are separable by ear alone, hold each one stable across dozens of episodes recorded over years, and do it without the face, body or timing cues that carry a live comic. Voicing three characters in a single series, as he did on *DuckTales*, means an audience must never suspect they are hearing one throat. Layered on top is the improvisational stamina of live children's television, where he sustained invented characters and puppet routines for hours with no script to fall back on. Both skills are learned and drilled; neither is mysterious. They are simply rare in combination.

The counter-case is straightforward: none of the sources consulted here calls McCann a genius. They call him a comic actor, a beloved kids' show host, and a prolific voice artist — the vocabulary of affection and professional respect, not of exceptional creative achievement. He originated no form, authored no defining work, and his most durable contributions are a cereal commercial and a butler in a cartoon. His own greatest passion, Laurel and Hardy, was other men's genius, which he spent a lifetime preserving rather than rivalling. The fair verdict is a supremely versatile professional entertainer with an unusually good instrument and seventy years of discipline behind it — admirable, and not the same thing.

Legacy

McCann married three times — Suzanne Conner, Eileen Somerstrad, and Betty Fanning, who survived him — and had three children; his son Sean died in 2009. He died on 8 April 2018 at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, aged eighty-three, of congestive heart failure, and was buried at Forest Lawn. What he left is oddly durable for a man who was rarely the star: the Sons of the Desert still meets, the Cocoa Puffs bird is still cuckoo, and somewhere in the memory of everyone who was a child in New York in the 1960s there is a large friendly man talking to a puppet, live, making it up as he went.

Achievements

• Worked as stand-up comedian, actor and film director