I’ve tried and tried to remember in my decades of watching trailers if I’ve ever heard a female announcer. Couldn’t do it, even for movies catering to female demographics. I find it hard to believe that out of the hundreds of movies released every year, just about all of them had a guy who sounded like Don or Don himself, and not many decided to use the seemingly reasonable tactic of an actor on that particular film to narrate the trailers
Why is this? Is “movie announcer” some kind of tenured position in the industry? Why is there not more diversity in the voices for trailers? Of all the types of voices, characters, and advertising tricks to use in movie commercials, why has this one seemed to stay relatively the same for so long?
There’s a gentleman names Hal Douglas who has done a ton of trailers, too. He did all the mock trailers in the recent movie The Holiday. IMHO, his voice is as recognizable as LaFontaine’s.
Douglas is 85 years old this year … I wonder who else is available to fill the vacuum.
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Shadoe Stevens has done some tailer work, hasn’t he? If not, seems to have the voice for it.
Wiki’s article on “film trailer” has a list and links to several notable voice actors who do movie trailers – one of whom is Keanu Reeves! I never knew about that.
Jim Cummings is still alive and kicking and he’s one of the Gods of Voice Acting. If you’ve seen a cartoon there’s a ridiculously high chance he was in it on at least one episode (the guy does Pooh, Tigger, Robotnik on SatAM and has had guest appearances in practically everything known to man), but aside from that he’s also one of the big Movie Trailer legends. And he’s only in his mid-late 50’s so he has a few years yet.
Believe it or not, doing voice overs, even if it’s a character you’re playing, is still a lot different from live action. A lot of actors rely more on their body language and presence to act than vocal inflection. It may be possible to, say, portray and AWESOME batman, but suck at voice-overs. Hell, there are only a handful of actors that can pull off a mask, I was VERY impressed Hugo Weaving put as much character into V as he did.
In fact, most of the trailers I can think of that had character V/Os had significant CG portions that would require voice-overs anyway, such as Spiderman (sorry… Spider-hyphen-man!) so the actor in question had to be competent in the art of voicing stuff without being on screen in the first place.
I’ve never said “Oh God, that guy!” more times in a row! The ever upbeat Disney-guy kills me!
Those of us who grew up in the mid to late 70s can’t forget Percy Rodriguez, probably most famous for doing the trailer for Jaws in '75. He had a really distinctive, almost creepy voice which worked well over horror trailers. Just found out he also had a major role in a great episode of the original Star Trek!
Melissa Disney is a female voice over artist, and she has done a few commercials too. Movies certainly seem to prefer male voices, though. Likely because Don got the whole thing started and everyone just copied him.
