On the Fritz

Or

Obsolete Man

(Props to Monty)

Fritz Weaver, the cheap, American Christopher Lee knock-off, has died at the age of 90. His early career included two appearances on The Twilight Zone: the imperious but cowardly Chancellor who kills Burgess Meredith’s quietly noble, if obsolete, librarian, and a scientist fleeing a planet on the verge of nuclear war in a spaceship bound for  - dun, dun, dun - a planet called earth. His big-screen debut was in Fail Safe as Col. Cascio, an unstable military officer with foreign-born parents who somehow gets a job in the headquarters of Strategic Air Command and orchestrates a coup that lasts about 18 seconds. His long, angular face, pointed Cap Weinberger-esque nose and deep voice made him a natural to play evil geniuses. Weaver helped Hal Holbrook feed his drunk shrew wife Adrienne Barbeau to a thing in a crate in Creepshow. He ran the shadowy Franklin Foundation that trained dolphins to kill the president of the United States in The Day of the Dolphin. He invented Proteus IV, an advanced artificial intelligence program that takes over his house and rapes his wife in Demon Seed. For his golden years, Weaver narrated a bunch of documentaries on The History Channel when it still gave a damn. 

If I Were a Live Man

Or

It's Time to Pay the Fiddler?

 

Or

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night...

 

Or

The Hills Will be Filled with the Sound of Silence for Captain Gone Trapp

(Props to Don)

 

Or

Sunrise, Some Set

(Kudos to beloved observer Bill)

Ted Bikel found a way off the roof, dying of natural causes at the age of 91. He started playing Tevye in The Fiddler on the Roof in his teens in Tel Aviv, and spent most of the next 7 decades schlepping through the shtetl, becoming the most prolific milkman in Broadway history. Showing a penchant for insufferable musicals, he also created the role of Captain von Trapp in the original Broadway production of The Sound of Music. He earned an Academy Award nomination in The Defiant Ones as the Sheriff pursuing Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. Other roles included Worf’s adoptive father on Star Trek: The Next Generation, German officers in The African Queen and The Enemy Below, and the holier than thou Oliver Crangle, brought down, literally, by his pursuit of evil. In addition to his acting, he was a well-regarded folksinger, co-founding the Newport Folk Festival.

Clamped

Donna Douglas, the two best things about The Beverly Hillbillies, not counting the Ballad of Jed Clampett, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 82. In the vein of Jeannie and Samantha Stevens, Mary Ann and Ginger, Betty and Veronica, Douglas and Nancy Culp (Miss Hathaway) formed one of the all-time great “Who’s Hotter?” pop culture debates. The tomboyish, critter lovin’ Elly May never cottoned to the ways of Southern California, and regularly battered the many suitors eager to visit her hills. Though she did enjoy the cement pond. Douglas’ other contribution to the 1960s was in the reveal in the Twilight Zone classic Eye of the Beholder as the patient whose reconstructive surgery-defying beauty makes her an outcast in the land of the duckfaced.

It’s a Condolence Card! It’s a Condolence Card!

Or

It's Safe to Go Back in the Water

(Props to Monty)

Or

Kieled Over

(An epitaphany shared by me, Monty and Steve)
Richard Kiel, best remembered as the hairy caveman that time forgot in Eegah!, has died at the age of 74. The acromegalic actor was the mechanically mouthed Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, the only Bond villain to make a return appearance other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld; the Kannemit emissary with a cookbook in The Twilight Zone classic “To Serve Man;” the crybaby inmate in The Longest Yard, Voltaire, henchman to Dr. Miguelito Loveless, played by dwarf Michael Dunn, in The Wild Wild West; and the giant, unstable fan in Happy Gilmore. The 7-foot-1 beanpole had been a leading contender to play The Incredible Hulk, and had even filmed part of the pilot, before producers wanted someone more muscular and went with Lou Ferrigno. 

Keefer’s Under Land

Or

It Was a Good Life

Don Keefer, whose bad thoughts got him turned into a jack in the box, has died at the age of 98. With more than 150 credits in a 50-year career, but only 1 recurring role, Keefer was the quintessential “Hey, it’s that guy,” with only his role in It’s a Good Life, where Billy Mumy as a child of limitless power who wishes those who displease him into the cornfield, standing out. Keefer’s death leaves only Mumy and Cloris Leachman, who produced the hell spawn, left alive from that episode.

And the Rest in Peace

(Whoop whoop for Joe Wright)

Or

Professor Emeritus 

Or

Three Hour Tour to Hades

(Props to Nathan)

Or

His Coffin Will Be Made of Coconut Shells Tied Together with Dried Seaweed

(Accolades for Terry)
Russell Johnson, who as Professor Roy Hinkley made a lie detector, a battery recharger, a telescope, a Geiger counter, jet-pack fuel, a bamboo xylophone, nitroglycerine, soap, shark repellent, a sewing machine, lead radiation suits and make-up, a helium balloon, a washing machine, water pump, telegraph, roulette wheel and pool table, but couldn’t fix a 4-foot hole in a damn boat, has died of kidney failure at the age of 89. The extended 3-hour tour wasn’t Johnson’s first crash in the Pacific, having been shot down over the Philippines during World War II, and having appeared in Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki. Johnson adopted his professorial persona early in 1950s sci-fi in such classics as It Came from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, and The Space Children, plus in two episodes of The Twilight Zone, having gone “Back There” in time to try to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and inadvertently temporarily staying an "Execution." In the infamous dream season, Johnson also played Sheriff Wyatt Mansfield on Dallas. 

Winters Discontent

Or

A Dearth of Mearth

(An epitaphany shared by Don and Phil)
Jonathan Winters, best remembered as Gunny, Randy Quaid’s father on Davis Rules, has died at the age of 87. Winters emerged as a stand-up, eschewing jokes for more character-based, stream of consciousness humor that left TV hosts and straight men in the dust as he introduced audiences to sweet/tart grandma Maude Frickert and Midwestern Everyman Elwood P. Suggins. Or he might re-create Hollywood movies, complete with sound effects, or be the one prop comic you didn’t hate, creating comic gems with just a pen and pencil set and a hat. While this made for hilarious late night appearances with Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and David Letterman and memorable set pieces in films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Loved One” and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” no sitcom could sustain him, until he landed a spot alongside his comedic progeny Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy in its shark-jumping final season. He even tried his hand at sci-fi, appearing as late pool great “Fats” Brown, who lost to Jack Klugman in the Twilight Zone episode “A Game of Pool,” but Winters outlasted Klugman by 5 months in the game of life. 

 

The Last Angry Man

Or

Odd Man Out

(Stolen without remorse from stiffs.com)

Or

Slab Coat

(Props to Monty)
Jack Klugman, who only got into acting school because of the war-time absence of able men and often sold his own blood to make rent, has died at the age of 90. Klugman was slovenly sports writer Oscar Madison to Tony Randall’s prissy photographer Felix Unger on the TV version of The Odd Couple, earning two Emmys to Randall’s one. The two remained lifelong friends, reuniting for a benefit stage version of The Odd Couple and a revival of The Sunshine Boys. Randall was one of the first people to visit Klugman after undergoing surgery for throat cancer, and Klugman wrote about their friendship in Tony and Me. Klugman then moved on to star in the weekly public service announcement that was Quincy, ME, solving crimes while delivering long-winded soliloquies about various medical and societal injustices. One of those soliloquies drew attention to orphan drugs – medications that treat conditions not common enough to make them profitable for pharmaceutical companies to pursue – with Klugman himself testifying before Congress to encourage passage of legislation that would offer economic incentives to develop these agents and then writing an episode of Quincy to shame Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been holding up the bill. He starred in 4 episodes of The Twilight Zone as a down-and-out trumpeter, an excellent small-town pool player, a spaceship pilot who refused to accept his own death and a bookie who trades his life for his soldier son’s. Despite the years of good will he earned on the small screen, he was unable to make John Stamos palatable and You Again? was cancelled after 2 seasons. His best known movie role is probably Juror #5 in Twelve Angry Men, as the product of a tough neighborhood who explains how switchblades are used; he was the last surviving member of the cast.

Windom of Heaven

William Windom, best remembered as the guy who was very happy getting Cabot Cove, Maine to say “Ah,” has died of congestive heart failure at the age of 88. After leaving Zork State/The College of Middle Earth/Williams College, Windom put his Midwestern local news anchor looks to use after the war on radio, TV and the stage. He was the prosecutor slapping around Gregory Peck’s inept Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, starred as the major in Five Characters in Search of an Exit, possibly the worst-ever episode of The Twilight Zone, he was Commodore Matt Decker who died trying to defeat the planet killer in The Doomsday Machine on Star Trek, but mostly he was Dr. Seth Hazlitt, friend of Jessica Fletcher and archnemesis of Amos Tupper, on Murder She, Wrote. And of course he pretended to be Ray Krebb’s father Amos on Dallas, before revealing Jock was really Ray’s father, elevating Ray from ranchhand to bastard scion and potential heir to the Ewing Oil fortune and meaning that all those times Ray was rolling around in the hayloft with Lucy, Gary’s little girl, he was really nailing his own niece.

You Catch More Flies with Honey West

Or
More Dead Than Alive
Anne Francis, best remembered as Mama Jo, cranky spinster head of an all-girl charter boat service moored next to Cody and Nick on the first season of Riptide, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 80. She also played Honey West, one of the first female TV detectives who matched her male counterparts with inexplicably well financed high-tech toys, unmatched martial arts skills, and needlessly exotic pets, in this case an ocelot named Bruce. Other gigs included two episodes of The Twilight Zone, as a witch infatuated with James Best, and the other as a mannequin come to live – not sure which is less believable, and was one of Lucy’s mothers-in-law-to-be on Dallas. She also starred in Forbidden Planet, the play William Shakespeare would have written if he had have conceived of a robot and an invisible monster that was the manifestation of the human Id. Francis died less than a month after her Forbidden Planet co-star Leslie Nielsen, who co-starred in Airplane!, which was based in part on The Crowded Sky, which co-starred Francis.

Your Funeral of Funerals

(Props to Monty)

Howard Morris, the beloved redneck Ernest T. Bass from The Andy Griffith Show, has died at the age of 85. Morris started performing in World War II, where he was Carl Reiner’s sergeant, then became “the other guy” in the classic comic ensemble on Your Show of Shows with Reiner, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Morris was also a prolific director, and helmed the pilot for Get Smart, a show created by Mel Brooks, who had been a writer for Morris on Your Show of Shows. Brooks also found work for him in History of the World, Part I, High Anxiety and Life Stinks. In a classic Twilight Zone episode, Morris plays a nebbish who, when given a choice of wishes by a genie, ultimately decides to become a genie himself. Morris’ high-pitched raspy voice was also a natural for cartoons, and he spent 40 years in the Hanna Barbera family as Atom Ant, Beetle Bailey and General Halftrack, Mr. Peebles on Magilla Gorilla, Jughead Jones, Professor Icenstein and Luigi La Bounci from Galaxy High School