Kenneth Mars

 played Ducky Roberts in the Tabitha episode, Paul Goes to New York.

Biography
Kenneth Mars was an American actor of film, television and stage. He was born on April 4, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois.

Mars graduated with a degree in Fine Arts and Drama from Northwestern University in 1963. He began acting in 1961 with the first national company of The Sound of Music as Baron Elberfeld and understudied the role of Max. Also in the cast was Barbara Newborn, who became his wife.

Mars was a farcical character actor best known for playing the police inspector with a creaky prosthetic arm in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic Young Frankenstein.

With a flair for German-type accents, Mars also appeared as the insane Nazi playwright who creates Springtime for Hitler in Brooks’ The Producers (1968) and as a Yugoslavian shyster in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972).

Mars had regular roles on television as ranch owner Otto Mannkusser on the Fox series Malcolm in the Middle, as W.D. “Bud” Prize on Norman Lear’s Fernwood Tonight and its offshoot, America Tonight, in the late 1970s and as Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin’s fireman neighbor in He & She, a 1967-1968 CBS series.

The Chicago native cultivated a robust career as a voice actor during his forty-plus years in show business, working on such projects as The Jetsons, The Flintstones Kids, The Little Mermaid, Duckman and Life With Louie. He was Grandpa Longneck in many installments of The Land Before Time series that ran on film, video and television.

In a take-off on Lionel Atwill’s local police Inspector Krogh character with a mechanical wooden arm in 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, Mars’ Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein sports an eye patch and monocle over the same eye, a disjointed wooden arm that moves in all manner of ways and an accent so thick even his own countrymen [cannot] understand him.

Mars also appeared in the Woody Allen films Radio Days (1987) and Shadows and Fog (1991), and in another dramatic turn, opposite Shirley MacLaine in 1971’s Desperate Characters. His stage appearances included the role of Martin Eliot in The Affair and Sir Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes.

Kenneth Mars died of pancreatic cancer on February 12, 2011, at his home in Granada Hills, California. He was 75. He was survived by his two daughters, Susannah and Rebecca, their husbands, and six grandchildren.