Jimmy Weldon, Ventriloquist and Voice of the Cartoon Duck Yakky Doodle, Dies at 99

Mike Barnes
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Jimmy Weldon, the cheery ventriloquist, kids TV host and actor who provided the voice for the endangered duck Yakky Doodle on Hanna-Barbera cartoons starting in the early 1960s, has died. He was 99.

Weldon’s death on Thursday in Paso Robles, California, was reported by American Legion Post 43 in Hollywood, where he was chaplain emeritus.

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With the puppet Webster Webfoot, a duck he created in the 1940s, Weldon hosted TV shows for youngsters in New York, Los Angeles and cities in the San Joaquin Valley. The Texan also appeared on episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, The Waltons, S.W.A.T., B.J. and the Bear, Dallas, The Rockford Files, Diff’rent Strokes and It’s a Living.

Weldon voiced Yakky Doodle, a yellow duckling with green wings who is constantly being bailed out of trouble by his best friend, a protective bulldog named Chopper, on recurring segments of The Yogi Bear Show in 1961-62.

THE YOGI BEAR SHOW, Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Snagglepuss, Yakky Doodle, 1961-88
From left: Yogi Bear, Boo-Boo, Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle on Hanna-Barbera’s ‘The Yogi Bear Show’

The youngest of three boys, Ivy Laverne Shinn was born on Sept. 23, 1923, in Dale, Texas. His father owned a Texaco service station. When he was working as a paperboy, he met a man who did a great Donald Duck impression; after lots of practice, he won a radio contest singing as the Disney character.

During World War II, Weldon served under Gen. George Patton and helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the service, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

In 1946, Weldon was hired as an announcer and disc jockey on the radio station KWCO in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where he would chat with the Donald Duck soundalike Webster in between spinning records. Listeners would often call in, asking to speak not to him but to his sidekick.

At WFAA-TV in Dallas, he needed a puppet to go with the duck voice when he was offered what would become The Webster Webfoot Show, and that’s when he became a ventriloquist, eventually a very good one. He and Webster then appeared on singer Kate Smith’s show at NBC.

With the help of singing cowboy Jimmy Wakely, Weldon came to Los Angeles and was signed by MCA. He hosted a program for boys and girls on KLAC-TV (now KCOP), and that led to Ralph Edwards hiring him to preside over the Saturday morning NBC game show Funny Boners, a kids version of Edwards’ Truth or Consequences.

(Clarence Nash, who was the original voice of Donald Duck, was not happy to have Weldon in L.A. as competition in those days, Weldon recalled in a wonderful 2019 interview.)

Later, Weldon and Webster stepped in as replacements for famed ventriloquist Shari Lewis and her puppets on Hi Mom on NBC’s WRCA-TV (now WNBC) in New York City, and he hosted other kids shows in California in Fresno, Salinas and Bakersfield.

He returned to Hanna-Barbera to voice many other characters for the company into the 1980s.

More recently, the patriotic Weldon spoke to schools and organizations with the mission statement “to instill in American youth a sense of civic, nonpartisan pride and a better understanding of our common heritage.” He regularly performed a tribute to Old Glory, I Am the Flag, and in 2019 published his memoir, Go Get ‘Em Tiger: Becoming the Person You Want to Be.

Weldon was married to Englishwoman Muriel Jones from 1947 until her death in 1988.

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