For a generation of American children, Skip Hinnant was the detective who took a scrambled word apart, one letter at a time, until it could be read. For a very different audience, his voice belonged to Fritz the Cat, the hero of Ralph Bakshi’s X-rated animated feature. The obituaries have set those two credits side by side, as if they came from two separate lives. They did not. They came from the same years and the same voice, and that overlap is the clearest way to understand what he leaves behind.

His family announced that he died in Denver, peacefully and surrounded by loved ones. What they chose to stress about his working life was neither the cat nor the decoder, but something no audience ever saw: his fight for the contracts of performers who are heard far more often than they are seen.

Fargo North, Decoder and The Electric Company

Hinnant was a charter member of the cast of The Electric Company, the PBS companion to Sesame Street, from its launch in 1971, and he stayed through all six seasons and 780 episodes until it ended in 1977. The ensemble around him included Rita Moreno, Morgan Freeman and Bill Cosby. His best-remembered character, Fargo North, Decoder, was what TVLine calls an Inspector Clouseau-style detective who deciphered scrambled words and phrases for his clients. He also played Frankenstein’s monster opposite Freeman’s Dracula and Jim Boyd’s Werewolf, along with J.J., Supper Man and the boy in “Love of Chair,” the show’s parody of the soap opera Love of Life.

The coverage of his death cannot quite agree on what the show was for. TVLine describes a series that taught reading skills to young viewers; Variety describes a companion to Sesame Street meant to help older children develop critical thinking. Fargo North is where the two descriptions meet. A detective whose cases are scrambled words turns reading into deduction, which makes it both things at once.

Fritz the Cat: Ralph Bakshi’s casting during the Electric Company years

It was during that run, Variety reports, that Bakshi recruited Hinnant to voice the title character of Fritz the Cat (1972), adapted from Robert Crumb’s lascivious, stoner cat. The film carried an X rating, became an underground hit despite Crumb’s objection to the adaptation, and was followed by the R-rated The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974).

Animation is the one form of cinema in which the actor’s face is never part of the performance, and that separation is what made the double career possible. The performer children saw in costume on public television could, in a recording booth, become the voice of an underground cat without the two roles ever sharing a frame. Bakshi’s adult-oriented features insisted that a cartoon could be made for grown-ups; for the Fritz films, the grown-up voice belonged to an actor from children’s television.

Schroeder, the Easter Bunny and a life in voice-over

That voice came out of the theater. Hinnant originated Schroeder in the Off-Broadway premiere of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1967, alongside Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown, Bob Balaban as Linus and his late brother, Bill Hinnant, as Snoopy. Earlier in the decade he had been part of Julius Monk’s revue Struts and Frets, performed for President John F. Kennedy at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and played Ted, the boyfriend of Patty Duke’s Cathy, on ABC’s The Patty Duke Show.

After Fritz came the title role of the Rankin/Bass stop-motion special The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town (1977), narrated by Fred Astaire; Pogo Possum in I Go Pogo (1980); voices on My Little Pony in the mid-1980s; and the 1990 TV movie Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. On screen he turned up in Sesame Street, 3-2-1 Contact, As the World Turns and Kate & Allie, while prolific voice-over work in animation and commercials filled the years in between.

The tribute his family wrote: SAG and the everyday actor

Hinnant served on the national board of the Screen Actors Guild from 1980 to 2003 and was active in Actors’ Equity and AFTRA. His family said he “was proud of his work to preserve commercial voice contracts and the everyday actor’s rights.” For a performer whose most famous work was heard rather than seen, the emphasis is telling. The commercial voice contract is the floor beneath exactly the kind of career he had: anonymous, prolific and paid by the session.

Born Joseph Howard Hinnant on September 12, 1940, he grew up on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, and owed his nickname to his older sister, Jean. He was 86. No cause of death was disclosed. He is survived by his longtime partner, Ruth Nerken; his children, Chris, Jamie, Julie and Sara; nine grandchildren; and his former wife, Miriam Hinnant.

The family did not point mourners toward the famous roles. They asked for donations in his name to the Entertainment Community Fund or the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, the safety nets of the working performers he spent more than two decades representing. Fargo North would not have needed long to decode that message.

Tags: voice actors, Fritz the Cat, Ralph Bakshi, Skip Hinnant, The Electric Company