It’s ironic, because movie trailers hardly use voiceover at all anymore, but more on that in a moment.
They may also think of animation voices, talents like Seth MacFarlane or Dan Castelanetta (he plays Homer on “The Simpsons,” along with a surprisingly large number of other characters).
But what people may not know is just how diverse the world of voiceover really is. There are dozens of ways people make a living doing VO, from commercials to promos to videogames, and more.

The most common type of voiceover is commercial work. Commercial voice over people can be heard on TV and radio spots, and also increasingly online. Styles have changed dramatically over the years when it comes to delivery. Gone are the days of the golden-voiced pitchman telling you which kind of detergent to use. Nowadays, you’re much more likely to hear a very low-key approach, with the talent having what sounds like a conversation with you, the listener.

The second most common is promo voice over. Networks sell airtime to advertisers to pay for programming, but they also allot a certain amount of airtime to promoting their other shows. These spots are usually the same length as an ad, and are designed to get the viewer to tune in to the show, usually airing at a later time.

Then there’s animation voiceover, which most people are familiar with. What many people may not be familiar with is just how many voices one particular voice actor may be capable of doing. For example, Seth MacFarlane not only voices Peter Griffin, he’s also the voice of Quagmire, Stewie, Brian, Tom Tucker, Carter Pewterschmidt, and several other characters. And that’s just one example. If you’re interested, check out all the well-known voices that Billy West or Jim Cummings do, if you’re looking to have your mind blown.   Funny voice overs are also popular with the rise in viral videos.

Voice actors are also behind the scenes of video games, often recording hundreds of hours of voice work to cover the many possible scenarios. And, as mentioned earlier, there are movie trailers, but if you’ll notice, most trailers now contain very little voiceover. The ones shown in theaters before features have almost no voiceover at all, save for the occasional off-camera words spoken by a character in the film. Most trailer work is now done almost exclusively for ads for films that run on TV, at least in the United States. (It varies in other countries)

In addition to all of this, you have live event announcers, which you’ll hear at stadiums and conferences, e-learning voices, telephony and on-hold voiceover, audio book narrators, documentary narrators, loopers (voice actors who provide background voices for crowd scenes for film and television) and on and on.
The bottom line is, virtually any time you hear a voice but don’t see a person speaking, there’s a voice actor at work!   If you’re wondering how to become a get voiceover jobs, there is a whole podcast about that!

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And so for years, I’ve wanted to find and re-watch some of those old episodes. Because I wanted to see if he was really as funny as I remember. He became so unfunny to me when he went to CBS that I thought maybe I mis-remembered how good he used to be. I recalled the show having this kind of punk rock spirit. From the very first episode, he came out, took you behind the scenes, showed you how it was all made, and how show biz was, in reality, all kind of bullshit. He would talk with his crew off camera. He’d go down the hall and mess with the people who did the WNBC news show, Live at Five. He’d ask his producer how much time he had left before he would do a bit. He seemed kind of surprised to actually be there.

All of that went away when he went to CBS, because, it had to. He needed to take things more seriously, to smooth out a lot of the bumps in order to appeal to a mainstream audience. He had to get rid of a lot of the stuff that gave the show its identity. The stuff that really spoke to me and my high school friends who would all stay up way too late watching it (it started at 12:30), and then we’d all talk about it the next day.

And that’s the other reason why I wanted to go back and re-watch. So many of my sensibilities, maybe even my entire generation’s sensibilities (if I want to over-generalize, and what the hell, why not) was informed, in part, by Letterman. His ironic detachment. His unwillingness to care about celebrity. Plus, that was when I totally fell in love with New York, the rough New York of the 1980s, when the people he’d go and talk to on the street were weird and a little off and it was freaking hilarious.

By the time I finally got to New York in 2000, most of that was pretty much gone. I did get a chance to see Letterman a couple times at the Ed Sullivan theater, and it was fine, but I knew what he used to be.

Anyway, some kind soul has uploaded a bunch of full episodes to YouTube.  Here are some episodes, in case you’re interested.  I hope they don’t get taken down!

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So, let me put this in terms as clear as I can make them: WORDPRESS IS AN OPEN SOURCE ENVIRONMENT, people. This means that themes/ plugins are constantly evolving. The updates that you see when you log in to the back-end are not meant to annoy you—they are the reflections of the developers’ hours of hard work, trying to make their inventions (themes/ plugins) keep up with all the security requirements of today’s internet as well as making sure those themes/ plugins work with the current version of WordPress.

The bottom line, for me, is this: if you see something you want to try out (like a pop up plugin or some cool gadget for the sidebar), great! Install it and try it. If you hate it, DELETE IT.   You don’t want something you don’t even use sitting on your site, just aging and making the site vulnerable.   Don’t be a digital hoarder, and while I’m on this metaphor, log in once a week and make updates!   You must keep that environment clean and up to date if you want your website to perform properly. I wish I could actually say what I’m thinking to clients, which is: “Don’t come crying to me when your site crashes because a) you didn’t update it and it got hacked, or b) you didn’t update it and when you finally did, there were so many conflicts, now it is showing an “Unavailable Due to Scheduled Maintenance” screen. That is not going to come back up without help, ok?   Also, your hosting company is not going to fix it for you. You created the problem by having too much old junk on your server, and now you’re going to pay, either in time or in money.   Maintenance is so key in these open-source environments, I can’t even over-emphasize that point.

There should be no reason you WOULDN’T be logging in to your site on a regular basis, though, because you should be regularly putting out quality, keyword-based blog content that is ranking you in Google and attracting new customers, right? RIGHT?

Seriously. Do yourself a favor and log in to your site right now. Clean things up a little bit, write a blog post, and delete some old stuff you know you’re not using. Schedule this activity for at least once a week. Making this one habit will save you thousands of dollars in “my site crashed” fees, plus it will grow your business! You’ll thank me later.

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