I think that was Lion-O rather than Lionel.
And yes, Woody was really annoying.
Anyone remember the really old Japanese animation that was dubbed into English called Battle of the Planets with a bunch of kids wearing costumes that looked like birds? The team was called G-Force and they used to have sections with an annoying R2-D2 type robot at their base explaining what was happening.
I read somewhere that the robot was added to pad out the really violent bits that they had to remove for the English dub version.