All the standard obituaries for Brock Peters, the imposing actor who died yesterday at the age of 78, are emphasizing his role as Tom Robinson in the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird. But for me, he’ll always be the voice of Darth Vader.

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Boy, this one is sad: Joe Ranft, part of the creative team at the computer animation film company Pixar, died yesterday in a horrific accident (he was a passenger in a car that went off a Southern California cliff into the ocean). He was only 45.

Most people have probably never heard of Ranft unless they’re major animation buffs, but he was a big-time force behind four of Pixar’s amazing raft of hits — Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug’s Life, and Monsters, Inc. all benefited from his writing talents. He also provided character voices for several other Pixar films, most notably Heimlich, the overweight and food-obsessed caterpillar, in A Bug’s Life. If you’ve watched the DVD supplements on any of those films, you’ll likely recognize his face.

In addition, a check of his filmography reveals that he had a hand in several other significant animated films of recent years, including Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and the film that, as much as anything, is responsible for the modern renaissance of film animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. I myself am not a big fan of animated movies, but looking over this list I realize that I am a fan of most everything Joe Ranft worked on. What a bummer…

If you’re interested in reading more, The Hollywood Reporter obituary is here, and the blog Cartoon Brew has remembrances and links to other relevant material here.

It may surprise some of my friends and loyal readers to learn that one of my favorite movies is… Smokey and the Bandit.

Yes, I am talking about that 1977 ode to redneck tomfoolery and car-crashes, and yes, I know the movie is horrible in about nine hundred different ways — not least of which is that it can be seen as the direct progenitor of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard feature — but, general stupidity and misbegotten descendents aside, SATB is one of the few movies guaranteed to bring me up when I’ve had a really rotten day. Burt Reynolds was a charming lead before he became overly fond of his own face, Sally Field was (and still is) a genuine cutie, the jokes are clever enough in an amiable, poke-you-in-the-ribs sort of way, and Jackie Gleason… well, what can I say about Jackie Gleason? The man was a friggin’ genius. Nobody has ever done impotent, spluttering exasperation better than him, and the interplay between Gleason’s Buford T. Justice and his idiotic son Junior never fails to crack me up.

There’s another funny father-and-son team in the movie, too, which most people tend to forget about: Big and Little Enos Burdette, played by Pat McCormick and Paul Williams, respectively. If you’ll recall, these are the two guys who hire the Bandit to make his famous beer-run to Texarkana. Well, I learned today that the “big” half of this team, Pat McCormick, passed away over the weekend at the age of 78.

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Being the devoted fanboy that I am, I’ve been monitoring the InterWeb Thingie over the past week to see what people have been saying about James “Scotty” Doohan. For anyone who may be interested, here are the highlights:

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After reading the previous entry, a friend of mine e-mailed to let me know of someone else whose passing is worth noting: Shelby Foote, the soft-spoken Southern novelist and historian who became a minor-league celebrity after appearing in the landmark PBS series The Civil War. Foote died Monday at the age of 88.

The general style of Civil War director Ken Burns — a slow pan across or zoom into an ancient photograph, accompanied by appropriate sound effects and actors reading from letters, diaries, and such — has become so much the de facto standard for historical documentaries that it’s hard to remember what an impact The Civil War really had back in 1990. I think it still stands as the highest-rated program ever to air on PBS, and I myself was utterly spellbound by the series. I’ve always been interested in this conflict anyway, but Burns and his talented cast of voiceover artists and subject-matter experts brought it to life in a way I’d never experienced before. Not the ersatz life of even the best fictional movie, in which you’re always aware that you’re watching modern people pretending to inhabit another era, but a sense of what things were really like in the early 1860s. I felt so in touch with the lives of the people being discussed that, at times, I almost expected the black-and-white photos that comprised most of the series to begin moving. It was like they were merely some sort of membrane between now and then, and if you just knew how to push, you could break through and see, hear, and smell everything that was.
Foote’s presence in The Civil War no doubt contributed greatly to this effect. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he appeared on-screen no less than 89 times during the 11-hour series. He had a knack for storytelling, and for breathing life into individuals who were formerly nothing more than meaningless names in a textbook. His mission was to make men like Lee and Grant human, to strip away the marble that now encases them and turn them back into the sweating, fallible, heroic, miserable people they actually were. That mission dovetailed nicely with Ken Burns’ goals, and the end result was one of the greatest pieces of documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen. As Burns himself has been quoted as saying, “[Shelby Foote] made the war real for us.”

If you want to read more, that Times article on Mr. Foote is the most complete I’ve found. You’ll probably have to register to see it, but I think it would be worth your trouble. As for me, I’m thinking that I may stop by Barnes and Noble tomorrow afternoon and see if I can pick up Foote’s own history of the war… all three volumes of it. Hey, it’s summertime; I could use a little light reading.

Well, here we go again… two more fine character actors that none of my readers will recognize by name have passed away. Oddly, both John Fiedler and Paul Winchell, who died within 24 hours of each other, are best known for working on the same projects, specifically Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh” films. Winchell, who died Friday at the age of 86, was the voice of Tigger from 1968 until 1999, and it was he who coined Tigger’s memorable catch-phrase “ta-ta for now!”

Meanwhile, Fiedler, who was 80 when he left us on Saturday, continued to play Pooh’s gentle little buddy Piglet right up to this year’s entry in the long-running franchise, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie.

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Well, now, this sucks — I just learned that one of my favorite character actors, Lane Smith, has died.

He’s one of those guys whose name you probably don’t recognize, but you’d know his face instantly; he did a lot of movies in the ’70s and ’80s that qualify as minor classics, including Rooster Cogburn, Network, Prince of the City, Frances, Places in the Heart, and one of the most incredibly jingoistic and far-fetched (yet entertaining) movies to emerge from the Reagan Era, Red Dawn. More recently, he’s appeared in lighter fare such as My Cousin Vinny, The Mighty Ducks, and Son-in-Law, which has the dubious distinction of being the only Pauly Shore movie that is remotely watchable.

Fans of genre TV will remember Smith as Nathan Bates, the power-hungry industrialist who collaborated with the alien Visitors in V: The Series, as well as the Elvis-obsessed editor Perry White in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Also, all the obituaries I’ve scanned note that Smith played Nixon in a TV miniseries called The Final Days, which I’m sorry to say I’ve never seen. (Personally, I tend to picture him in the opening credits of V, parked behind a big desk with an oily smile, an ugly suit, and a cigar the size of a car muffler.)

The best obituary I’ve found indicates that he died from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I mention this little factoid only because I’ve had some personal experience with ALS, and my ears tend to prick up when I hear of someone being afflicted with it. Trust me, it’s not a pretty way to go, and it breaks my heart that this talented man had to face such a miserable end.

For the record, he was 69 years old, only a few years older than my parents and way too damn young for this…

Another actor familiar to fans of classic ’60s television has passed away: Leon Askin, the squatty man with the bulldog face who constantly threatened to send Col. Klink to the Russian Front on Hogan’s Heroes, died recently in his hometown of Vienna. He was 97 years old.

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