22 January 2010
Omnipotence
It’s the end of the week, and I need an excuse to post YouTube videos.
After my last post, I got to thinking about the perpetual appeal of the resonant, male, overdramatic voiceover. For example:
Don LaFontaine, whose death got a lot of publicity last year:
GOB Bluth, as played by Will Arnett:
And lastly, this story on NPR , a.k.a. one of my very favorite things of 2008: an interview with two voice-over actors who do threatening political ads. It was something that strongly resonated with me at the time that it aired, because we went through at least one election cycle in Wisconsin where we’d see political ads for the Senatorial race that did just what they discuss in the interview. “Russ Feingold was the only US senator to vote against the US Patriot Act!” a happy, proud voice would tell us, music swelling softly in the background. “Russ Feingold was the only US senator to vote against the US Patriot Act!” a disgusted voice would tell us as a piano plinked a few dark notes in a minor key.
In the interview, I particularly love how you can just hear their lips curling in distaste as they spit out the ever-ominous word liberal. It makes me wonder what a similarly derisive pronunciation of the word conservative would sound like: light irony, perhaps, barely tempering raw derision?
I’ve written before about how I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack to my life–or merely one that provides music for an appropriately dramatic entrance–but I think I need to correct that to say that I wouldn’t mind a soundtrack or an overdramatic voice-over to narrate banal household events.
Gaaaaarth… pursues his TAIL!
Sebastian… claims he doesn’t know about the missing milk in the cereal bowl. He’s NOT telling the truth.
Peter… eats MUESLI!*
Can’t you just imagine the way that they’d tear into all the vowels in the word “muesli”?
* Pete gleefully stocked up on some super-cheap imported muesli on sale at the PA two weeks ago only to find that Swedish efficiency had dutifully sucked all the joy out of it. It’s a bowl of dried oats — like, exactly what you’d get in a bag of the unflavored old-fashioned oats you buy for baking — with a couple specks of also unflavored puffed rice and some nearly-microscopic diced dried vegetables near the bottom. Although I see that we bought it for much less than it sells at IKEA, I’m even more dismayed to see that we don’t get the bag art featuring a flaxen-haired Scandinavian lass to reinforce its salubriousness.