Dick Nelson

Prolific television writer Dick Nelson got his start in Hollywood as a voice actor: a wide variety of his goofy voices can be heard in several of the classic crackpot cartoons legendary director Tex Avery made for MGM Studios in the 1940s. This included one of Avery's most beloved shorts, 1949's "Bad Luck Blackie," in which Nelson plays a streetwise cat who brings bad luck (mostly in the form of dropping anvils) to a bulldog who had tormented an innocent kitten. Nelson followed his stint in animation with a handful of roles in 1950s drive-in flicks, including the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" favorite "The Amazing Colossal Man," in which he has a walk-on part as one of the Army sergeants tasked with hunting down the title character. But by the dawn of the 1960s, television was ascendant, and Nelson moved into writing for the small screen with an episode of a short-lived New Orleans crime drama called "Bourbon Street Beat." By the mid-'60s, he was penning episodes of hit series like the spy caper "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and the Western drama "Wagon Train." He found his greatest success in the 1970s and '80s, on the writing staffs of the comic-tinged Western "Alias Smith and Jones," the stalwart crime drama "Barnaby Jones," and the glitzy nighttime soaps "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest." He also wrote a handful of made-for-TV movies; his one big-screen feature was the 1971 Western "One More Train To Rob," starring George Peppard.