LizzieMaine
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I can only barely remember newsreels but I'm surprised they lasted as long as some of them did, longer than I realized. The interesting thing about them is the way news that you see on Yahoo or MSN almost exactly parallels what you saw in a newsreel. In fact, some of the events are the same; only the dates have changed. There would be something about the saber-rattling in Europe or the Far East, something about new hats in New York, something about the floods on the Mississippi (it's always flooded, you know), bathing suits in Miami or Atlantic City, something about the economy perhaps or politics. I always wondered who did the voice-over. It was good, just like the narration on Walt Disney nature films.
Most of the newsreel announcers were radio veterans -- Lowell Thomas narrated Movietone News for over thirty years, but was better known as a radio newscaster, who remained on the air thru 1976. Graham McNamee, probably the most famous radio announcer who ever lived, narrated Universal's newsreel until he died in 1942. He was replaced by Ed Herlihy, the cousin of radio comedian Fred Allen, and would eventually become known as the announcer-voice of Kraft Cheese in commercials lasting into the 1980s. An actor by the name of Gregory Abbott was the narrator for Paramount News for its entire run -- an achievement duplicated by no other newsreel voice. Pathe never had a definitive voice, but used several popular radio announcers over the years, including Alois Havrilla in the 1930s, Dwight Wiest in the 1940s, and Andre Baruch in the 1950s.
Most newsreels also had specific commentators for sports and feature news. Movietone used Ed Thorgerson and Mel Allen, both radio veterans, for sports reports, and Vyvyan Donner for fashion news and "women's features." But perhaps the best remembered Movietone feature was a German-dialect comedian named Lew Lehr, who hosted the "Newsettes" segment. This was where you'd find comedy footage of crazy inventions, bathing-beauty contests, circus acts, or, most popularly, animal footage -- with Lehr punctuating the footage with brutally awful puns and jokes. His catch phrase, which came out of the popularity in the 1930s of film clips of chimps doing ridiculous things, was "Monkeys iss der cwaziest peoples!"
You can see dozens of original Movietone News reels here -- these are the actual reels as released to theatres, not compilations or clips of individual stories, and they give you a good idea of how a typical newsreel was put together in the Era.