In newsreels like this you have a familiar urgent timber “announcing” the news like this one. News, even special bulletins these days are pitched much more conversationally. These voices also seem more pitched to the tenor range than announcer voices these days, or is that just the sonic limitations of the medium?
What was it about these newsreel announcer’s voices that made them so compelling? Your ears perk up just listening to them. You know it’s something important.
Y’know, I’ve wondered about that too. There was a certain sound to those old announcers…a special timbre or something. I suspect part of it may have just been the primitive audio technology of the day, with close listening the voices sound kind of tinny, like they’re coming from a distance instead of being right there in the same room. Also, the announcers tended to speak fast and clip their words, probably for extra clarity to compensate for the poor sound reproduction.
Then too, the newsreels were all overdubbed, and with no accompanying live video it was probably easier to adopt an impersonal tone rather than emoting all over the screen as the current announcers seem to do. Some of the older anchors that got their start in radio and stayed into the modern TV news era projected some of that “newsreel tone”…Walter Cronkite, for example, and Frank Reynolds of ABC. And then there were the “perfect radio voices” like Paul Harvey and radio evangelist Carl McIntire.
One of the best mimics of this sound was done by William H. Macy as the sportscaster in the movie Seabiscuit
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Those old newsreels were fantastic for their urgency of presentation. The fact that they were all narrated by some guy with a higher pitched, loud, rapid-speaking voice made it seem like you had to sit up and listen - right now!!
Not in the example you showed here, but I also loved how hokey some of the text would get - “Looks like little Billy has made a new friend…” as they cut to a picture of a pony eating some kid’s ice cream cone as the little kid cries in terror.
We tend to forget that long before television, the only way for people to see things in the news was to go early to a movie and catch these newsreels. My parents told me that people would go, hoping to perhaps get a glimpse of their son or husband in the war in these short films.
Imagine today if the only way we would have seen film footage of the WTC on 9/11 was from movie newsreels and how important they would have been to us. Now imagine how people back then felt when watching those films about places their kids/husbands were during the war.
It was a presentation from a movie studio. The cameras would record the visuals and the studio would add sound effects and music. One famous voice from that period, and I’m going to spell his name wrong, was Ed Herlihy (well, it sounded like that).
Keep the presentation urgent and vital.
I believe today’s voiceover industry would consider the old-school delivery to be “puking” – industry slang for an overdone, overinflected reading that takes away from the message.
These may have been speaking styles that carried over from the days before high fidelity audio. This might have started in the days of radio, gramaphones, or even in the style of barkers in the days before amplification.
I’ve also always wondered what the deal was with that type of narration. It also seemed common in the really old film strips we watched in school. (Maybe this is a false memory; it may just be that I’m so used to seeing things like this on The Simpsons. Examples include filmstrips about sand, zinc, and the moon.)