Entertainment For Lively Minds
In a world where...
...incredibly deep voiced men no longer did voiceovers for movie trailers.
Sad to hear of the passing of the fabulous Don LaFontaine - owner of THAT voice which adorned so many trailers over the years. A true (cheesy) master within a very very small and select field.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7595352.stm
It's amazing how one person can reach near ubiquity and be immediately recognisable to millions across the globe yet remain almost completely anonymous to the general public. Even his characteristic VO opening "In a world where..." has become a true movie cliche. In the above article he explains the reason behind it:
"We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to," he said of his viewers.
"That's very easily done by saying, 'In a world where...violence rules' 'In a world where... men are slaves and women are the conquerors' - you very rapidly set the scene."
Those 5 minutes after the lights go down and before the feature starts just won't be the same any more!
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One man...
(I know it's Hal Douglas rather than Don LaFontaigne, but...)
Will voiceovers change?
Without any disrespect towards the late Mr LaFontaine, I really, really hope this means the end of the oh-so-corny gravel voiced 'in a world where...' style of voiceover. They were beyond hackneyed some decades ago, and I always thought it peculiar that the film industry, usually so concerned with being as up to date as possible, would persist in using an advertising technique which was so old-fashioned and, to me at least, intensely irritating.
Gravel=gravitas. . .
according to American marketeers. And, over there at least, they may be right - just compare and contrast Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's voices and reputations for evidence of that.
The British equivalent of LaFontaine was Patrick Allen, but he went out of fashion in the early Eighties, when "real-sounding" throats that punters could "identify with" became the advertisers' voice-overs of choice.
More top-quality journalism from the BBC website
If he did indeed voice "hundreds of thousands" of commercials at a rate of "seven to ten" sessions per day, his career must have been between 83 and 119 years long.
Hmm. But he started in 1965, we are told, so his actual career was only 42 years long. In that case, assuming a normal working year of 48 five-day weeks (without allowing a single day for being off sick), and taking his workrate as 8.5 sessions a day (the mean of 7-10), he can't have recorded more than about 85,000.
Gotcha!
(Even I can figure that out, and I failed my Pure Maths & Statistics "O"-level.)
Aha!
But a single session might include the recording a number of different recordings for the same film or product. In the footage attached to the BBC piece, he claims that his busiest day featured 26 sessions comprising 185-190 recordings.
Aha!
Yes, I also thought after posting that they might be including the dozens and dozens of commercials made with the single recording of him saying "From Max Factor" tacked onto the end.
(I couldn't watch the footage because I'm in the middle of a house move and my speakers are in box 63. Er...or was it box 36?)