The voices we hear and the descriptions we listen to when watching movies or television. Flashbacks, documentaries, the Present Day. Who perfectly captures the mood? And what completed the picture or ruined it?
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Peppa Pig’s infamously known for having a narrator letting the characters repeat everything he says for no reason… sometimes. So here’s an example of that.
And here’s the same episode without the narrator.
So tell me: which one would you guys prefer?
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I always found it interesting that Planet Earth and other documenteries in that series had a different narrator in the US, as though we wouldn’t be able to stomach listening to a British voice or something. Pierce Brosnan and Sigourney Weaver did great jobs as well, of course, but David Attenborough was just fine.
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That’s weird because from what I understand, Americans are more likely to pay attention to instructions given by someone with a British accent. In fact, the Minneapolis airport has a British woman making all announcements (or at least it used to when I was using it relatively regularly).
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I’m ex-military and worked retail for 20 years. I speak fluent gibberish.
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Would anyone even remember this show if if weren’t for the iconic “just the facts, ma’am” narration of its star?
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On a more serious note has there ever been a narrator that made a show more than Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone?
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I actually know of Dragnet because of a parody of it on Square One called Mathnet. It used all the same tropes of Dragnet but the cases were solved with mathematics.
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Geoffrey Holder in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is sorely underrated.
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My favorite case! (Edited to put in the full case, not just one part of it)
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One of my all-time favorite narration lines:
“It had rained that day… but was it normal rain… or was it CHUBBY RAIN?”
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I would let the lull of Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice wash over me in my happy place.
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If I could have a narrator for my life, it would be Avery Brooks (Capt. Sisko from DS9). I love his voice. I love that deep, rich voice.
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I remember the late Bill Bixby narrating Once Upon A Classic for PBS in the 1970s, and to this day he’s my favorite read-me-to-sleep voice.* Damn, but I was sad when I learned that only fragments of that show still survive. Nobody thought they were worth archiving. 
*This would horrify my folks, who always bought us British kids’ records hoping to make Anglophiles of us. But it’s neither the first nor last moment in life where we parted company on important subjects. 
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Paul Frees was the man in demand for voiceover work in radio, movies and TV for decades
He also wrote and directed a movie about (alleged) Beatniks which MST fans may have seen.
Here, his son discusses that movie.
And just for fun . . .
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