Ernest P. Worrell is one of the Blind Bag characters in LEGO Dimensions 2: The Rise of Enoch, from the Ernest franchise.
Background[]
The Ernest ads were shot with a handheld film camera at the Nashville-area home of producer John Cherry and Jerry Carden. As their number of clients increased, Jim Varney sometimes did upwards of 25 different versions of a spot in a single day.
The commercials and the character had definite impact; children especially seemed to imitate Ernest and "Know whut I mean?" became a catchphrase. Such popularity was bound to be exploited, and both a television series, Hey Vern, It's Ernest!, and a series of theatrically-released motion pictures followed. The movies were not critically well-received; however, they were produced on very low budgets and were quite profitable. In the films, Ernest is apparently somewhat aware of his extreme resistance to harm, as in Ernest Rides Again, he seemed barely fazed by nails bending after being fired at his skull; he also commented that he would be dead "if he wasn't this close to being an actual cartoon".
Varney in his Ernest role appeared in dozens of Cerritos Auto Square commercials for many years on Los Angeles area television stations, along with commercials for Audubon Chrysler Center in Henderson, Kentucky. In the southeast the Ernest character was the spokesman for Purity milk.
Sometime in 2005, after Varney's death, the Ernest character was given a CGI makeover and came out in new commercials. These commercials were created by an animation company called face2face and produced by Ernest originators Carden & Cherry. Ernest was voiced by John C. Hudgens, an advertising and broadcast producer from Little Rock, Arkansas, who also played an Ernest type character in some regional live action commercials.