According to some googling (Okay, from looking at his Wikipedia page) he was named Waylon after Wayland Flowers.
The greatest of them all: Beaver Cleaver.
From the same era, it wasn’t until years later that I learned the true meaning of the name of a major villain on Underdog, “Simon Bar Sinister”.
In heraldry (and no doubt someone will come along and point out how wrong I am about everything), a “bend” is the diagonal line that divided the shield, like a sash. A “bend dexter” would run from the upper left to the lower right, as viewed from the front. A “bend sinister” would run from the upper right to the lower left. A horizontal line is referred to as a “bar”, but Sir Walter Scott apparently started the trend of calling the bend a “bar sinister”. The bar sinister signifies that the bearer is illegitimate.
Which is a roundabout way to get to the meaning of his name: Simon the Bastard.
The kids show Lego Nexo Knights has knights named Clay, Axel, Lance and the token girl, Macy. One guess to match which one uses a mace, lance, axe, and claymore. There’s also Aaron, who uses a bow, but spends most of his time flying.
[Five year olds, at least, are amused when they figure this out]
cartoons are a rich source of pun names.
Jay ward gave us (in addition to those listed)
Dr. Chicago – Super Chircken villain
Robin Hoodlum – Crusader Rabbit villain
Zero (a parody of “Zorro”) – Rocky and Bullwinkle
Terrytoons:
Crabby Appleton (“rotten to the core”) – villain on Tom Terrific
Trans-Lux “Felix the Cat” series:
The Master Cylinder – Villain – an Evil Robot in the form of a cylinder
At San Diego’s infamous Over The Line tournament (70’s, Fiesta Island), one of the teams named themselves “The Beaver Cleavers.”
From The Tick, American Maid, Batmanuel, and Apocalypse Cow
And, my favorite, Bi-Polar Bear.
Also his pal, Ragland T. Tiger (aka “Rags” the Tiger, a play on the song The Tiger Rag), villains Dudley Nightshade (=Deadly Nightshade) and Bilious Green, and the two-headed fire-breathing dragon Arson and Sterno.
I’m sure the OP is looking for characters from normal fiction instead of parody, but pretty much every character in Bored of the Rings has a punny name: Goodgulf Greyteeth, Arrowroot son of Arrowshirt, Frito, Spam, Moxie, Pepsi, Legolam, Gimlet son of Groin, Tim Benzedrine, Sorhed, Goddam, Schlob, Birdseye of the Vee-Ates, etc.
Die Fledermaus was much funnier.
Anna Livia, who embodied Dublin’s River Liffey (with a more Irish pronunciation) in Joyce’s Ulysses.
Indeed. That’s why I excluded Harry Potter and James Bond. I thought it would be evident that cartoons are often/usually specifically designed for such things. I was hoping for things more… subtle.
But the toothpaste is out of the tube.
In the novelization, the Russian ambassador is named De Sadeski (not mentioned in the movie as far as I remember, though maybe in the credits) and the Russian Premier’s name is Kissof. The first Peter Sellers character is named Mandrake, and the James Earl Jones character is named Lothar (Zogg). For you youngin’s out there, Lothar was the partner of Mandrake the Magician.
OK, to make up for the unsubtle Bored of the Ring names here is one from literature: In “Decline and Fall” by Evelyn Waugh the main character is Paul Pennyfeather, described as “a man of very little weight.”
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
In the film Goodfellas that’s a character named Frankie Carbone who gets killed by being put in the back of a refrigerated meat truck and is hung up on a meat hook in-between the rest of the meat. “Carbon” in Spanish means Charcoal and has very strong connotations with meat like “Tacos Al Carbon”. Thus Frankie Carbone corpse fits in perfectly with all the meat.
Or in Italian even…
A short running show from the late 90s called Action had the lead character named Peter Dragon, which I always assumed was a play on the size of his, um, peter.
John Ringo does some clever renaming in his zombie apocalypse series Black Tide Rising.
Anna Holmes (vs Emma Watson), Harrison Ford is in there (with his last name being a different car company). Other celebs and notables are also thinly veiled if you read close enough.
-DF
There’s a bunch of this in GI Joe. The mountaineer trooper Alpine’s real name is Albert Pine, the hovercraft pilots name is Skip A. Stone.