Don LaFontaine

In a world . . . there, I said it. Happy?

—his last line, delivered on an episode of Phineas and Ferb

There haven’t been a lot of trailers with voiceover since 2008. Voiceover in general seems to have ebbed, but in particular the sort of thing where a voice told you the details you need to know about the movie before you see it, or at least that the people putting together the trailer think you need to know. You used to get that a lot, and I’m not sure my kids have ever seen a trailer featuring it. If they have, it’s probably older than they are; their dad and I will sometimes watch older media of our childhoods simply because it’s there. And when he and I were younger, Don LaFontaine was everywhere.

Apparently, his voice changed at about age thirteen, and his first work was calling schools for his friends, posing as their fathers to get them out of classes. His deep, bass voice was ideal for that unless of course his friends were like my kids and everyone in the office knew their parents’ voices. Still, upon graduation, he went to work as a sound engineer in the US Army, which is perhaps not the MoS you’d expect for him. While working on the trailer for Dr. Strangelove, he discovered he had some pretty good ideas on how to actually make a trailer, and he went into business for himself.

In 1964, he was only 24 and already ran his own trailer production company, which is fairly impressive. And then the actor hired to do the voiceover for the trailer for Gunfighters of Casa Grande didn’t show up. If you haven’t heard of the movie, it’s not terribly surprising. It’s a Western made in Spain. Possibly the biggest name in it is best known for being Louis B. Mayer’s nephew. Still, it needed a trailer, and the trailer called for voiceover, and the actor didn’t show up, and LaFontaine stepped up and recorded it himself.

It made him a millionaire. He could do nearly three dozen voiceovers in a day, at his peak. This despite literally phoning it in; he took recording equipment on vacation, even, but rather than go into a studio, he did it all at home after a point. The work didn’t suffer, and lots of companies were willing to pay extra to get his melodious tones. The average person didn’t know his name or face, but for a while there, it was basically impossible not to know his voice. There are still parodies of him fifteen years after his death.

He doesn’t seem to have been one of those people who relied on smoking to get deep, rich tones, but certainly he smoked a lot. It caused him serious health problems, and he eventually died of a collapsed lung. He wasn’t much older than my mom, and we could have had his smooth voice telling us about, say, a world where those we knew as gods lived and partied and fought before one of their number having to come to Earth. Wouldn’t that have made for a magnificent trailer? Taika Waititi could’ve made great use of him in an actual film, I feel, too. Or maybe he could’ve voiced a Pixar character. In short, don’t smoke, kids.

I’m hardly a millionaire, but a buck or two a month in my Patreon or Ko-fi would help keep columns like these afloat!