Whitney Rydbeck, the actor and mime who portrayed the last of the paintball victims in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI and one of the original crash test dummies in an iconic public service campaign that promoted seat belt safety, has died. He was 79.
Rydbeck died Monday of complications from prostate cancer while in hospice care in Chatsworth, California, his longtime friend Tommy McLoughlin, the director on Jason Lives, told The Hollywood Reporter.
“We lost not only a truly funny comedian and actor … but one of the most good-hearted human beings I’ve ever known,” McLoughlin wrote in a tribute on Instagram.
The lanky Rydbeck appeared on dozens of TV shows during his busy career, from The Brady Bunch, Phyllis, M*A*S*H, Cagney & Lacey and Highway to Heaven to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sisters, Living Single, Party of Five and Scrubs.
In the fifth Friday the 13th film, released in 1986, Rydbeck impressed as the comically nerdy Roy, who while wearing protective goggles over his regular glasses comes across the masked villain in the woods during a corporate paintball game. He tries to run away, but he’s not going to survive.
Like Jason, Rydbeck and Tony Reitano also donned masks, not for a movie but to play the crash test dummies Larry and Vince, respectively. Because they were foolish enough not to strap in, they bounced around in car accidents and suffered lots of damage — while supplying researchers with data on how passengers can escape injury.
The slapstick series of ads, which debuted in 1985, closed with the line, “You Could Learn a Lot From a Dummy.”
Whitney Wilbert Rydbeck was born in Los Angeles on March 13, 1945. He attended Pasadena High School, Pasadena City College and then Cal State Fullerton, where he studied theater.
Starting in the early 1970s, he and McLoughlin were members of the Richmond Shepard Mime Troupe and the McLoughlin-founded L.A. Mime Company. “He was the perfect guy for that since he was so great at physical comedy,” McLoughlin noted.
Rydbeck made his onscreen debut on a 1970 episode of Nanny and the Professor before he and McLoughlin put their mime skills to work as silent robots in the year 2173 in Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973).
Before the decade was through, Rydbeck would also show up in the George Hamilton-starring Love at First Bite (1979), the Sylvester Stallone-directed Rocky II (1979) and Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979).
In 1979, he starred as a cab driver who discovers a robot sent to Earth from another planet on the NBC kids show Whitney and the Robot.
His résumé also included the films Oliver & Company (1988) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996) and the TV shows Lassie, Switch, 7th Heaven, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Far Out Space Nuts.
More recently, he taught drama at Pasadena City College. Survivors include his girlfriend of 10 years, Claire.
In 2010, Whitney Rydbeck (right) and Tony Reitano celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Vince and Larry crash test dummies public service campaign.
Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post
For the Department of Transportation’s crash test commercials, Rydbeck told The Washington Post in 2010 that it took about 45 minutes for he and Reitano to get into costume. Their masks completely covered their heads, not allowing them to hear, see or talk properly. (Jack Burns voiced Vince, Lorenzo Music voiced Larry.)
In the story, Rydbeck joked that he worried that one day a newspaper would carry the headline, “Actor Who Played Crash Dummy Died for Not Buckling Up.”
“I always buckle up, I’ll tell you that,” he said.