The movie trailer voice-over, relic of the past?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by Veech, Dec 23, 2017.

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  1. Veech

    Veech Space In Sounds Thread Starter

    Location:
    Los Angeles, CA
    Don LaFontaine was the master of movie trailer voice-overs. It seems that once he died he took the trailer voice-over with him. I can't recall the last time I saw a trailer with a voice-over. It seems that trailer plot exposition is now driven with film dialog and dramatic music. Are there any recent trailers with voice-over or are they a thing of the past?

     
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  2. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    He died almost a decade ago and wasn't the only game in town either. I stopped going to the movies a loooong time ago and have stopped watching trailers as well.

    Just checked random ones on iMDB for kicks and did not see a single one with voiceover. Very strange trend. Instead of a synopsis, we're just shown bits. Sounds like another way for studios to save money.
     
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  3. LeBon Bush

    LeBon Bush Hound of Love

    Location:
    Austria
    My favorite voice-over of all time was the german trailer for Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (here it was named "Ein Zombie hing am Glockenseil", roughly translated to "A Zombie hung from the bellrope"). One sentence from the vouce over went along the lines of "Was nützen Dolche gegen Zombies, vor allem gegen den, der am Glockenseil hing?" which translated to "What use do daggers have against zombies, especially against the one who hung from the bellrope?" - I couldn't stop laughing upon hearing THAT sentence :biglaugh:
     
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  4. JozefK

    JozefK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Dixie
    Art Gilmore (1912-2010)

    [​IMG]

    He narrated scores of TV shows, commercials, record albums, and other media, but for movie buffs he will always be The King of the Trailers.

    From his NY Times obit:

    As the narrator of countless movie trailers (his wife estimated he did 3,000), Mr. Gilmore was an especially effective pitchman, delivering the language of hype with masterful conviction. Comedies, thrillers, romances, musicals, animation, documentaries — it didn’t matter. Among the films Mr. Gilmore promoted as coming attractions were “Dumbo,” “A Place in the Sun,” “Roman Holiday,” “Shane,” “Born Yesterday,” “Rear Window,” “South Pacific,” “War and Peace,” “Ocean’s 11,” “White Christmas” and “Bye Bye Birdie.”

    “The screen jumps for joy with Glendon Swarthout’s inside story of those uproarious Easter vacations,” Mr. Gilmore pronounced in the trailer for “Where the Boys Are,” a 1960 comedy about college girls on the make. “Never before has any film contained such a full measure of the joy of living,” he asserted in the trailer for Frank Capra’s life-affirming small-town tale from 1946, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

    For the 1953 science-fiction thriller “The War of the Worlds” he declared: “This could be the beginning of the end for the human race!” And in a virtuosic bit of melodramatic recitation, he described Alfred Hitchcock’s loopy and masterful psychodrama “Vertigo” (1958) as “the story of a love so powerful it broke through all the barriers between past and present, between life and death, between the golden girl in the dark tower and the tawdry redhead that he tried to remake in her image.”​

    He could do any genre, and had impressive range:



    Shane (1953)

    But IMHO he was best suited to comedy and lighter material, making Paramount the perfect studio for him.

    Stalag 17 (HD Trailer)

    Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis "Hollywood or Bust" 1956 theatrical trailer

    He can be seen in the trailer for The Big Clock:

    The Big Clock Trailer (1948)

    [​IMG]
     
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