Paul Winchell (December 21, 1922 – June 24, 2005) was an American ventriloquist and voice actor, whose career flourished in the 1950s and 1960s . During the mid-1960s, he hosted the children's television show Winchell-Mahoney Time (1965–1968) . Winchell was also an amateur inventor, becoming the first person to build and patent a mechanical, artificial heart, implantable in the chest cavity (US Patent #3097366) . He has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in television . For Disney, Winchell was best known for voicing the character Tigger in Disney's Winnie the Pooh films, and won a Grammy for his performance in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too . Beginning with the television series The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, he alternated in the role with Jim Cummings, the current voice of Pooh . Winchell's final performance as Tigger was in Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine for You (though Winchell played Tigger one more time in the attraction The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh featured in the Disney theme parks) . Following Winchell's retirement, Cummings permanently took over the role of Tigger starting with The Tigger Movie in 2000. Other Disney roles included parts in The Aristocats as a Siamese cat named Shun Gon, and The Fox and the Hound as Boomer the woodpecker. On TV, he was the original voice of Zummi Gummi on Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears. The show was produced at KTTV-TV in Los Angeles, which was owned by Metromedia. In 1986, Winchell sued Metromedia (which by then was about to be purchased by Fox Television Stations as the foundation for the new Fox Network) over syndication rights to 288 surviving videotapes of the show. Metromedia responded by destroying the tapes. Subsequently, a jury awarded Winchell $17.8 million. .