Commercial Voices

There’s still one area where people who are heard on television don’t get credit on the air—commercials.

I’ve watched an awful lot of spots over the years where I recognise an announcer’s voice (I guess they’re called voice-over artists now) but can’t name them.

Others are easier to identify. They may have appeared in cartoons (eg. June Foray) or elsewhere (egs. Art Gilmore, Joe Sirola) where their names have been mentioned. Or they are celebrities like Bob and Ray for Piel’s (I don’t know who plays the Piel’s announcer to the right).

Steven Scheuer of King Features’ “TV Key” service wrote a couple of stories in the late ‘50s about commercial voice-over people. The first one got screen credit in a Walter Lantz cartoon and later on Chuck Jones’ 1961 Warner Bros. short Nelly’s Folly (There’s an irony that the narrator, radio actor Ed Prentiss, gets no credit).

This piece appeared in papers around Sept. 5, 1958.

GLORIA CAN IMITATE ANYTHING
By STEVEN SCHEUER
The name Gloria Wood doesn't mean anything to you. If you heard her voice, that wouldn't register, either, but the chances are you’ve heard it more often than, say, Steve Allen’s.
When you hear "Duz, Duz, Duz!" that's Gloria. Minnie Mouse is Gloria’s voice and so is Tinker Bell fluttering around that jar of peanut butter. She's the Indian boy who says, "Santa Fe, All the Way,” and the female voice on every beer commercial you can name.
Besides plugging all makes of beer, Gloria is a big cigarette jingle girl. That penguin saying, “Smoke Kools, Smoke Kools,” is little five foot tall Gloria.
Gloria is in a good racket. She gets residuals (that means more money) after her commercials arc repeated a certain number of times. She does an average of one commercial a day and claims to have recorded 1,600 commercials on radio and TV over the past three years. The repetition of the jingles gives her the dubious distinction of possessing the most heard voice in the world—in addition to perpetual income.
“I blame it all on my four octave voice range,'' said Gloria in Hollywood, now the center of the jingle business. "When the ad agencies discovered I could imitate practically anything, the jobs started pouring in. Thank goodness.”
Gloria said that up until 1951, the jingle business wasn’t very big and she came in at the right time. A Medford, Mass., girl, Gloria sang with her sister Donna Wood and her Don Juans in Horace Heidi's band. Then she moved along with bands of Clyde Lucas, Hal McIntyre and Kay Kyser, where she was the voice of "Woody Woodpecker." That record, according to Gloria, sold 4,000,000.
Gloria moved over to Bing Crosby’s radio show to be the voice of "Rudolph, the Rod Nosed Reindeer.'' Her next big thrill was cutting a record called, “Hey, Bellboy,” and all she uttered were those two words. As Gloria says, "I usually don't sing words."
She's itching to do ballads with lyrics, like other singers. One of her boosters has been Frankie Laine, who keeps encouraging Gloria, saying “someday!” Frankie talked to his head man, Mitch Miller, the A & R man for Columbia records, and Mitch now has Gloria in an album. There may even be a medley of some of her hit commercials on record soon.
About her four octave voice. After "Hey, Bellboy!” Gloria was tabbed as the "American Yma Sumac.” Gloria can go to E flat above high C in a clear voice. "You have to have a clear voice to do commercials," said Gloria seriously. "Elvis couldn't make the grade. His voice isn’t clear enough.”

Gloria’s publicist was pretty busy around this time. Around the same time as this story, Erskine Johnson of the Newspaper Enterprise Association gave her a couple of paragraphs in his column, including the fact she sang for Marilyn Monroe; Vernon Scott of the United Press mentioned her latest album for Columbia, “Wood for the Fire,” a torchy blues collection; while James Bacon of the Associated Press pointed out she was making $250,000 a year. Wood, according to her Los Angeles Times obituary, made 7,000 commercials before her death on March 4, 1995.

About a year later, Scheuer spoke with another person who made the rounds of commercial studios. You won’t recognise his name from Warner Bros. or Walter Lantz or Walt Disney. A Variety story from April 1, 1959 mentioned he had recorded an English language soundtrack to an Russian animated version of Snow White. I can’t help but wonder if the trade paper meant The Snow Queen, where you can hear Paul Frees, Dick Beals and one June Foray. He also provided a voice in this animated PSA starring Bob and Ray. And he was a carrot. I presume it was a commercial voice-over.

Announcing Boon For Boone
By STEVEN SCHEUER
Announcer Mike Baker, regular announcer on the Pat Boone show, isn't sure of exactly how many different commercials he did last year. One thing he is sure of, he worked for a lot of organizations. He had 44 W-2 forms to include on his income tax return.
Though he'd been an announcer on radio and TV for a long time, Mike didn't come into prominence in the field until a couple of years ago when he impersonated Edward R. Murrow's voice on a radio soft-drink commercial. It was a thoroughly successful impersonation—CBS lodged a complaint. A lot of national publicity followed and Mike was on his way.
There was only one drawback," Mike told me. "I was embarked on a career as an announcer, but after the Murrow impersonation, most of the calls I got were requests to imitate other people's voices. I'm still getting calls and I'm trying desperately to make people forget that part of my talent. I'm not interested in trading on another person's voice. If the sponsor thinks so much of the person he's trying to hire me to imitate, why doesn't he hire the original? I don't mind doing character voices, but I’m through with impersonations.
Mike's been busy doing character voices—he supplied voices for some 25 cartoons during the past year—and is quite proud of the fact that among his creations is the voice of a carrot. "It's crisp," he explained.
Mike bemoans the fact that both radio and television have fallen into a pattern of conformity. "When radio stopped diversifying," he commented, "it became an immense bore. Every station gives you the same top forty records around the clock and you hear the same sketchy news bulletins a dozen times a day. There's no individuality and sooner or later it has to bore the public. The funny thing is that the one place where you do find individuality is in commercials. A lot more time, effort and even money is put into commercials than into many shows. And in some cases the commercials are more entertaining than the shows.”
In regard to his own contributions to a commercial, Mike is confident of his versatility.
“I do hard sell, medium sell and soft sell,” he said "Different products require different techniques.
The best automobile commercials are medium to soft sell, but other products require a hard sell. A good rule of thumb is: ‘The faster you want to move a product, the harder the sell.’”

There’s an old saying about the certainty of two things in the world—death and taxes. So long as broadcasters need to make a profit, you can add commercials to the list. And until A-I fully takes over, there will need to be people to voice them.