It's Winchell-Mahoney Time!

Hooray! Hurrah! It's Winchell- Mahoney Time. It's Winchell- Mahoney Time! It's time for fun!

Only you older folks likely remember that. It was the theme song for the Winchell- Mahoney Show. Something on TV the other night reminded me of it. It was a cartoon show I watched back in the '60s. You had the ventriloquist, Paul Winchell, and his two dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff (I always thought it was Smith). 

They did the show before a live audience of young kids- my age or younger. There would be some slapstick back and forth between Winchell, Mahoney and Smiff, but I watched it for the cartoons. Even back then I think I found ventriloquist dummies creepy. 

I hadn't realized until I read Paul Winchell's Wikipedia entry what a career he'd had. I only knew of him as the guy who made those creepy dummies talk. I had no idea he was also an inventor and invented the first mechanical artificial heart. He died in Los Angeles in June 2005.