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Paul Winchell is a featured article, which means it has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Disney Wiki community. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.

Paul Winchell was an American actor, voice actor, comedian, humanitarian, inventor, and talented ventriloquist. He was best known for voicing Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh franchise, Shun Gon the Chinese cat in The Aristocats, Boomer in The Fox and the Hound, and Zummi Gummi in the first five seasons of Adventures of the Gummi Bears.

Outside of Disney, Winchell was well-known for voicing Sam-I-Am, Guy-Am-I, and some of the Sneetches in the television special Dr. Seuss on the Loose, Dick Dastardly in the Hanna-Barbera shows Wacky Races, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, Yogi's Treasure Hunt, and Fender Bender 500 (from Wake, Rattle, and Roll), and Gargamel in The Smurfs.

In Winchell's earlier years, he worked as a hypnotist by helping people undergo surgery. He had also been an inventor, with some of his ideas being an artificial heart and a flameless cigar lighter. A patent for one of his ideas, a disposable razor, was disapproved on the basis of it being considered ridiculous for people to buy razors to throw them away after a single use. Ironically, that concept had soon become hugely popular.

Winchell got into show business as a ventriloquist and had his own show called The Paul Winchell Show. He operated multiple puppets; two of his best-known ventriloquist dummies were named Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. The Jerry Mahoney puppet now resides in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C..

During Winchell's time on Winnie the Pooh and Gummi Bears in the latter part of the 1980s, he had taken an interest in famine and malnutrition. With actor Ed Asner, Winchell lobbied Congress to appropriate foreign aid for landlocked nations to encourage the breeding of the tilapia fish, which was a source of protein and could survive in different types of waters. Although it had been well researched, their idea was ultimately disapproved as aquaculture in Third World nations that lacked access to the ocean was inadvisable.

Winchell was married three times, fathering five children. Through his second marriage to British actress Nina Russel, he had a daughter, April Winchell, who later became a voice actress herself.

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