Entries Tagged as 'announcers'

Voice Actor Mara Junot Serves as Live Announcer for the 2024 Screen Actors Guild Awards on February 24

Voice Actors Mara Junot and Peter K. O'ConnellMy friend and fellow voice actor Mara Junot will be the announcer for the live broadcast on the Screen Actors Guild Award on Saturday, February 24 at 8pm ET on Netflix.

That statement may surprise you (not that I have a friend but that…well, OK maybe you are surprised I have a friend that’s a real person but…oh shut up).

Anyway, Mara is an extremely talented and versatile voice talent, that’s the whole point.

I have known Mara for many years and while I would not be so arrogant to say we are close friends (we live very far away from each other, also she is young and I am as old as death), if I were to see her next week, we would start talking like it had not been over 4 years since I last saw her.

She’s just that friendly, kind and open. She’s just Mara…I think she’s like that with everybody.

It’s a gift.

While I am (of course) extremely bitter that I did not get the live announcer gig for yet another major award show (my perfect record of “not invited to audition” remains safe) 😉 if anybody else should get the live announcer gig, it should be Mara.

I know my fellow friends in the VO industry who know Mara share my inordinate joy for her on securing this great gig. 🙂

When you see the show and hear her work, you’ll understand. She deserves all good things.

Jeopardy’s Announcer, Johnny Gilbert, is Amazing

Johnny Gilbert Jeopardy Announcer

The original and current announcer for the syndicated broadcast of “Jeopardy”, Johnny Gilbert

As much as I focus and study the voiceover industry and it’s players, I still miss stuff.

I catch up eventually but I don’t know that I’ll ever catch to voiceover legend and RECORD HOLDING ANNOUNCER Johnny Gilbert, the announcer for Jeopardy.

Rightly so, a lot has been made about the health struggles of beloved Jeopardy host Alex Trebek. As Trebek has worked through his cancer fight, the most recent on-camera work of his now 35 year reign as host of Jeopardy continues to be a perfect as his first days.

But with Alex since day one of this version of Jeopardy has been his off-camera announcer, Johnny Gilbert. Gilbert’s opening line: “This. Is. Jeopardy!” is iconic and he continues his significant announcing duties more than 3 decades later with amazing perfection.

Gilbert is also the Guinness World Record Holder for longest career as a game show announcer for same show, now at 35 years.

Oh and this little side note of this working professional announcer: Johnny Gilbert is 95 years old!!!!!!!

Johnny Gilbert is an amazing voiceover talent.

Here’s some behind the scenes on Johnny’s work.

‘Oh, and you’ll be our live announcer. Go!’

As you know, with me, there’s always a voiceover story.

Even at a Little League baseball game.

It was last weekend at one of my children’s games…but this was more than a regular game. This was part of a kind of baseball festival at this really nice baseball facility in Cary, NC.

I am not a coach of my son’s team but just one of many Dad helpers there to support the Manager (mostly during practices). This day, the Assistant Coach asked if I would take the team lineup to the facility’s pressroom because as a special part of this big baseball event, the players are introduced over the PA for each game. For the young players, this is a really special treat that does not happen at regular games.

As instructed, I went up to the press room which is on the second floor of this kind of hub structure at this multi-field park that looks a bit like an airport control tower – from the 2nd floor deck you can see all the surrounding fields. I walked in and handed a person our lineup sheet, told them which team it was for and the field we would be playing on so they could do the introductions.

“No, no,” the person said. “You have to come up just before the game starts so you can do the announcing. We have someone from each team do the intros,” the person said.

I took a second to make sure I understood what they just said, as it was a surprise to me.

“Someone from our team does the actual team intros on the PA?” I asked? He confirmed I had heard correctly.

I thought the town would just have an employee do it or hire a radio guy for the weekend. Nope. A parent.

As there were four parents including me helping out on my son’s team and three of them (not me) had jobs on the field during the game, I knew how this story was likely going to end.

I went down to my son’s coaches and I said, “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is they want someone from our team to do the team intros on the PA. The good news is I do live announcing for a living, so if you want, I can do the intros.”

They thought that was a swell idea.

So back up I went to the airport control tower/baseball complex HQ to await my instructions from the Town of Cary employees (all very nice folks).

Things happened pretty quickly once I got back inside.

desk microphoneThe audio setup was very, um, practical. The speakers outside were pretty good. The microphone, inside the fairly large, mostly glass walled room, was a very low end desk mic with a push-to-talk switch….kinda like I used to have on my CB radios in the 70’s.

But it all worked.

My son’s team was the home team, so the parent from the away team did the intro’s for the away team first. I was instructed that, because I went last, my job after I read the coach’s name on our roster, I was to say “Play Ball”.

It was very hard to hear anything going on outside which led me to believe this must have been much more than single-paned glass I was surrounded by. I knew I was going to be louder than the previous parent (or probably most parents announcing during the event). I knew I’d have to back off the mic a bit so I would not sound distorted.

Make it exciting, I thought. Make it memorable, I told myself. Make it sportstacular!

On second thought, I may have been just solely focused on name pronunciations.

In any case, at the last minute I had the good sense to grab my phone to record it. The camera work wasn’t pretty (nor was/is the subject) but the announce went just fine and the kids (and coaches) were thrilled.

learning from mistakes – the radio version

Being a voiceover talent AND an old radio person, behind the scenes stuff involving announcers has always fascinated me for no particularly good reason. Social media has taught me I’m not the only VO/Radio Guy who finds this stuff interesting.

So the other day, when I was listening to NPR, I noticed there was a different voice doing the underwriting announcement. It was particularly different to me because it was a man.

What was going on? Was this ANOTHER NPR announcer change?

As you may recall from a blog post a few years ago (2013 to be exact; you do have all these posts memorized, don’t you?), a man named Frank Tavares who had been the NPR underwriting voice for decades ended his run. A change was made.

In deciding to make a change in their underwriting voice, NPR management decided to pick a female voice. An voice and stage actress named Sabrina Farhi was chosen.

While I liked her commercial demo, I am on record as saying I did not like the underwriting reads Farhi gave on NPR…. after about 2 years, neither did NPR. For the bad reads, I blame NPR.

In 2015, Jessica Hansen replaced Farhi as NPR underwriting announcer. Fortunately, Farhi is still doing voiceover and theatre work, according to her web site, as she should.

Hansen gives a better promo read than Farhi did but I always hear a kind of aloofness in Hansen’s underwriting reads as opposed to a more friendly or at least conversational read that I think might sound more engaging to the listener.

Also, it should be assumed and can be safely noted, NPR doesn’t give a rat’s butt about how I think their underwriting scripts should be read…likely nobody does.

Also I’m going to assume that Hansen, like her predecessor, is reading as directed so she can’t be blamed if I don’t like her reads.

So since I’ve heard a male underwriting announcer recently, does that mean he has replaced Hansen at NPR?

Doesn’t seem so. But it does seem like I am late to the party on the addition of this second announcer to the NPR funding credits voice roster.

This article from Virginia Commonwealth University notes that their alumnus, Chioke I’Anson is one of two voices now reading Underwriting Promo scripts for NPR. This change took place around November 2016. Evidently I hadn’t been listening closely enough to NPR.

Dr. I’Anson (Ph.D.) is not a professional voice talent. NPR’s director of promotion and audience development heard I’Anson at an NPR Story Tellers Workshop, liked his voice and offered him the job.

Where was the lesson in all of this? Let’s go back to 2013, when NPR replaced Tavares with Farhi…the change was trumpeted across the media. When Farhi was replaced (fairly or unfairly depending on how you look at it), NPR looked bad.

When L’Anson came on board, it was billed as ‘an addition’ to the announcer roster not ‘a replacement’. Further, there was very little written about it. No big announcement, a behind the scenes change, done and done. That, it would seem, was the lesson learned.

giving the announcer his due

announcerOften times, I feel like a was born in the wrong era. When I think of the birth of radio and consequently, the birth of the announcer, well, that’s one of those times.

In 2016, most people don’t have a sincere understanding of what radio meant to their forefathers in the 1920’s. It would be unfathomable to a teen or twenty-something today to accept almost 100 years ago radio immediately became an indispensable necessity to every American (possibly every person in the then modern world – but I don’t know the rest of the world’s broadcast history as well as I know America’s).

At a given time back then, maybe 60% or more of the U.S. population would be tuned into a single radio broadcast or network. No broadcast or network enjoys that kind of broadcast influence today. Radio, the medium, and its performers were true and enormous stars of the first magnitude

At the center of it all was the radio announcer. The unique, often calming voice that offered direction, news, commercials and so much more to listeners throughout the radio broadcast day.

That must have been so cool to work in radio back then.

Folks today know about Don Pardo because of Saturday Night Live. But he wasn’t even among the most famous of the early days of radio. People in Pittsburgh know of KDKA radio and some folks in our country might know that station was America’s first commercial broadcast station. But Harold Arlin of KDKA was the first nationally recognized announcer in America. He was a really big deal!

What about Milton Cross who was the voice of the Metropolitan Opera, hosting its Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts for 43 years, from the time of their inception on December 25, 1931 until his death in 1975. That was a national program. Oh, and Cross actually started his radio announcing career in 1921! That’s AMAZING!

And then Fred Foy. Not sure who he was? He was the announcer for the Lone Ranger radio series. Yup, a bunch of you just experienced that light bulb: “Ahhhhhh!”

Nobody like that exists today. No one even close.

Since Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show left the air (his announcer Ed McMahon went with him), the closest thing modern media has is Conan O’Brien’s sidekick/announcer Andy Richter. Andy’s great (truly) but he doesn’t have the sway that guys like Arlin had in his day.

Change is a constant. Life and media evolve.

Though I still think it would be fun to “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…”

live announcing in a theatre makes it a performance

Peter K. O'Connell Live Announcer

Getting up on a stage was never something I strove towards.

I really much prefer being in the back of the house in a closed off space or room with a microphone, which is pretty much the set-up for most of the live announcing I have ever done.

But this past Veteran’s week, in my live announcing duties for the area American Legion Band, there I was, coming through the curtain of a tightly packed stage (full of talented musicians, mind you) in a very handsome theatre to guide the hundreds in the audience through a night of memorable, emotive songs.

Of course, I’ve done more of my share of MCing (emceeing, being an MC or emcee – grammar rules and spelling always fail me on this word) and that’s basically what this gig is for this enormously talented band. But of the majority of those many other emceeing events I’ve done over 30+ years, the events have historically been held at a hotel banquet room or similarly bland location.

When you’re on a stage, in a fully functioning theatre with a marquee outside and inside you see a proscenium arch, giant stage curtains, lighting grids, dressing rooms, spot lights – the whole shooting match – it’s a bit more real. For me it feels less like “emcee” or “live announcer” and more like “stage performer” – something I NEVER wanted to be.

Except I was. The spotlight squarely on me. Oy! I should have polished my shoes or something.

Thank goodness there’s a script for me to read on stage because memorization, in my finest hour, was never a strong suit and today at my age, it just ain’t happening.

I made it through, my part went fine and everyone said they were very happy with my ‘performance’.

That’s kind, but I would have been just as happy if I’d simply been called a fine “live announcer”, left in a backstage room with a reading light and a live mic. The stage is not the place for me.

But hey, it’s all good. I must remember that it’s just nice to be invited. And above all, I AM appreciative.