Tuesday, October 11, 2022

The Face You've Seen, the Voice you Know

We noted previously the voice-over role of late actor Harry Morgan, who played the role of military pilot "Red Dog One" during the famous UFO encounter over Washington, D.C. in 1952, but his was not the only famous disembodied voice to play a part in the movie.

Olan Soule (1909-1994) provided much of the off-camera narration for "U.F.O." Having started his career in radio in 1933, he quickly branched out to TV in its fledgling years and way beyond, and also had movie roles galore.  According to numerous sources, Soule was a deceptively thin 135 lb. bundle of energy whose "chameleon" voice was heard on 7,000 radio shows, commercials and TV cartoons.  He appeared on some 200 TV series and films, and chalked up roles in more than 60 motion pictures.  His authoritative narration in "U.F.O." seemed as essential as Ernest Gold's music score.

As long as we're discussing voices, another of the movie's narrators was actor Marvin Miller, who played the title character on TV's "The Millionaire" in the fifties.  Not to be confused with another series, this was the fictional one where Miller's character would give away one million dollars to a deserving person during every weekly episode, with the money donated by charitable multi-millionaire benefactor "John Beresford Tipton," who insisted strictly upon anonymity. Wouldn't you?  Miller's movie involvement is actually mentioned in his bio at the International Movie Data Base site.