When I was a kid, I remember watching Soupy Sales. He had a children's show, The Soupy Sales Show, on channel five in the New York area and he was a wacky, funny guy. He had bizarre creatures around him, puppets named Pookie and White Fang and Black Tooth. Soupy did outrageous things and often ended up with a pie in the face. In a lot of ways, there might have been no PeeWee Herman if there hadn't been a Soupy Sales. In my memory, I always liked Soup and liked his show. On Thursday, Soupy Sales died at the age of 83.

In addition to The Soupy Sales Show, Soupy was a comedian. He played clubs and did shtick, and all through the 1960s and 1970s he was a regular on game shows, including What's My Line, To Tell the Truth, Match Game and Hollywood Squares.

Jim Henson passed away in 1990, but two years later, on this very day, we also lost another important Muppet performer: Richard Hunt. Hunt joined Henson for several of the Muppets' appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, and eventually joined Sesame Street, performing characters such as Forgetful Jones and Don Music. On The Muppet Show, he performed Beaker, Janice of The Electric Mayhem, Statler (one of the old men in the balcony) and Scooter (whose Uncle owned the theater).

Hunt also performed half of the Two-Headed Monster on Sesame Street along with Henson. The chemistry on stage between Henson and Frank Oz is often talked about, but Hunt was equally brilliant when working with Henson, as the hilarious exchanges between Statler and Waldorf prove. Casual fans may not hear much about him, but he was an important element in bringing that zany Muppetness to the TV screen.

I placed some clips of Hunt's characters below for your enjoyment, so, enjoy them.

[via Muppet News Flash]

Typically when someone in the field of animation passes away myself and many of the cartoon/animation site pick up on it long before the mainstream media does, if the mainstream media cares at all, so I feel kinda bad for not reporting this sooner. Anyway, composer Shirley Walker, who wrote music for cartoon series including Batman: the Animated Series, The Zeta Project and Spawn, as well as the Final Destination film franchise, died of a brain aneurysm on November 29 at the unfortunately early age of 61. Walker wrote scores for both television and film since the late 1970s, including popular primetime soap Falcon Crest and the goofy 1980s Gremlins rip-off, Ghoulies. She was working on the direct-to-video DC: The New Frontier when she passed away.

[via Toon Zone]

Wow, it's been a bad week for TV veterans.  First Curt Gowdy passed away, then Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Now comes word that Dennis Weaver, who acted in various roles on television for over fifty years, passed away Friday at the age of 81, apparently due to complications from cancer.

Weaver's best known roles were as Chester Goode on the long-running Western Gunsmoke and as a New Mexican cowboy lawman transplanted to New York City in the Seventies mystery series McCloud.