Joe Flynn

Joe Flynn’s time in McHale’s Navy pretty well overlaps the early days of his time with Disney; he first appeared as the uncredited character of Rex Williams in Son of Flubber, which had its premiere on New Year’s Eve 1962, and McHale’s Navy had debuted on October 11 of that year. Those were the hardcore days of television; the series lasted four seasons, and Flynn was on all but one episode—meaning a mere 138 of them, apparently. That’s nearly 35 episodes a season, and these days some people complain about bulk when a series makes twelve. Of course, none of the episodes of McHale’s Navy have much to do with one another plotwise.

Flynn was himself an Army man, having served in World War II in the entertainment division. Reading between the lines suggests that he’d been at Northwestern and dropped out to enlist; he started college again at the University of Southern California, majoring in political science. However, even before the military, he’d been a ventriloquist and disc jockey—which seem to be opposing jobs but never mind. He’d even directed plays in Ohio before enlisting, which makes him very young indeed to be directing Antigone. And Harvey, because why stick to a genre?

Wikipedia claims that he said that his determination to go into comedy came when people laughed at his serious role in Indestructible Man, but sir, I have seen Indestructible Man, and it is nothing to do with your inherent comedic chops. That said, yes, Flynn had a gift for comedy, albeit as the straight man in most of what I’ve seen him in. It’s the voice, alas. That’s not a voice you can take seriously in King Lear. It is indeed much better suited for The Love Bug or The Million-Dollar Duck.

Which means I saw a lot of Joe Flynn as a child even though I’ve only ever seen the dire modern movie remake of McHale’s Navy. A childhood being brought up on The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes can make it a little hard to process seeing him in The Desperate Hours, but I was genuinely fond of him in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. He’s a stick-in-the-mud, which seems to be the character in which he was most frequently cast, but he’s trying so hard to do his best and it’s not his fault he’s in, you know, a weird Disney movie.

His last movie role was actually for Disney, though he didn’t live to see the finished product. He’d recorded his role of Mr. Snoops in The Rescuers in 1974. Well, the production time on an animated feature is long, after all. One morning, family members discovered him floating in his pool, apparently dead of a heart attack while swimming. It’s an interesting role to go out on, one of Disney’s great Second Bananas. Which makes two great villains’ Second Bananas he played, in The Rescuers and The Love Bug. He was so good at it.