Chuck McCann

 early career

McCann was a comedy giant to a generation of children who grew up watching his children's shows in the New York metropolitan area during the 1960s, having worked his way up to regional star status by apprenticing on a number of other children's shows like Captain Kangaroo and Rootie Kazootie (the show on which he met his one-time puppeteer and sidekick, Paul Ashley). The best-selling "The First Family", an early '60s LP record album which lampooned the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy and his family, included McCann among its voices.

On Palm Sunday, 1965, Chuck McCann's cousins were telling their friends that their cousin was Chuck McCann. They didn't believe them so their mother called him and told him that people were calling her children mean things about 'lying'. Chuck McCann said immediately to come over. They did and were put on his show, showing McCann's good character and family relations.

To around 1967, the tall, portly, moon-faced McCann hosted comedy/variety TV puppet shows in the New York area. McCann did The Puppet Hotel for WNTA-TV, Channel 13; then Laurel & Hardy & Chuck, Let's Have Fun and The Chuck McCann Show for WPIX, Channel 11; and finally, The Chuck McCann Show, The Great Bombo's Magic Cartoon Circus Lunchtime Show and Chuck McCann's Laurel and Hardy Show for WNEW-TV, Channel 5. In addition, Chuck was the comedy sidekick on the WPIX long-running Clay Cole Show.

McCann's career was burgeoning by the time he left Channel 5, a victim of changing TV trends. By the end of the 1960s, he had appeared to critical acclaim in the 1968 film The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and performed regularly on CBS's The Garry Moore Show and Happy Days . He also began a successful cartoon voice career, doing everything from Bob Kane's Cool McCool to Sonny the Cuckoo Bird ("I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!") in commercials for General Mills. He had even been one of the stars of producer George Schlatter's ill-fated offshoot of Laugh-In, the one-episode Turn-On.

In the 1970s, McCann's life and career shifted west, and he relocated to Los Angeles. He made frequent appearances on network television in everything from Bonanza to Columbo to The Bob Newhart Show. He appeared in the 1973 made for TV movie The Girl Most Likely to.... He had a steadier job as a regular on Norman Lear's All That Glitters. In addition, he co-starred with Bob Denver in CBS's Saturday-morning sitcom Far Out Space Nuts, which he co-created. The 1970s also brought him fame in a long-running series of commercials for Right Guard anti-perspirant: he was the enthusiastic neighbor with the catch phrase "Hi guy!" who appeared on the other side of a shared medicine cabinet. McCann also impersonated Oliver Hardy in commercials for various products , and for a few years he played the holiday-season recurring role of Kris Kringle on the NBC soap opera Santa Barbara.

McCann continued voice work for cartoons, playing Jollo, Bookworm, Bump-On-A-Log, and Woof in 1992's King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow and speaking as The Thing on the The Fantastic Four and Hulk animated cartoon series. He was also the voice of Leatherneck in the 2nd season of G.I. Joe. Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, he has been in commercials—at Christmas he has played Santa Claus for one product or another—and TV/movie gigs . He also voices Navarro, and Buck in Random! Cartoons and Dumptruck,Gibber, and Sadie in Disney's Talespin.