Benjamin Blümchen has lost his voice: Jürgen Kluckert dead

In the mid-1990s, however, Kluckert took over the voice of Edgar Ott’s popular elephant series after his death. Since then, more than 70 episodes have been created with the characteristically good-natured, deep voice at the heart. Fans of the animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants” also have Kluckert in their ears as the spokesman for the crab character Mr. Krabs.

The graduate of the Ernst Busch state acting school dubbed many Hollywood stars, including Freeman and Norris, as well as Danny Glover and James Brolin. In the 1980s version of the television series “Magnum” he voiced Roger E. Mosley in the role of the helicopter pilot “TC”. Kluckert was also seen as an actor on German TV, several times with supporting roles in “Tatort”.

In the post-war period, Kluckert initially lived in East Germany and played at the Maxim Gorki Theater for twelve years, among other things. “I left the GDR in 1980,” he said in a 2022 “History Channel” interview. “I then also acted in the Federal Republic of Germany, but I ended up more and more in the dubbing studio. In the GDR, someone said to me before: ‘You have a very nice voice! Try DEFA-Synchron! There you can still earn something extra!’ And then I did that.”

He had “dubbed so many people, but I haven’t met any of them yet,” he recalled in an interview. Inheriting the role of Benjamin Blümchen was a challenge, he said in an interview. “Edgar Ott died in 1994. And he also voiced Sinclair in “Die Dinos”. That was the first thing I took from him because I sounded a bit like him, that is, if I had the voice a bit change. It didn’t work with my normal voice.” During the first recordings, he “every time I said a sentence, (…) listened to a sentence from Edgar. In the meantime, of course, I don’t need it anymore. We’ve become freer and faster.”