Allan Melvin commercials for fifteen years. In the early 1980s, Melvin appeared as a regular in "Archie Bunker’s Place", a successor to "All in the Family", in which he played the now more important role of Barney Hefner. When this series ended in 1983, Melvin’s work was exclusively devoted to cartoon voice-overs. Allan Melvin died of cancer on January 17, 2008, aged 84, and was buried at Westwood Memorial Cemetery in Southern California. Melvin is buried just yards from his TV best friend Carroll O'Connor, who played 'Archie Bunker' in TV's "All In The Family". Coincidentally, later the same year, famed 1950s
Archie Bunker the show progresses, it becomes apparent that Archie's prejudice is not motivated by malice, but is rather a combination of the era and environment in which he was raised and a generalized misanthropy. Archie himself is depicted as a hard worker, loving father, and basically decent man; nevertheless, he is bad-tempered and frequently tells his long-suffering wife Edith to "stifle yourself" and "dummy up". Series creator Norman Lear admitted that this is how his father treated Lear's mother. As the series progressed, Archie mellowed somewhat, albeit often out of necessity. In one episode, he expresses revulsion for a Ku Klux