silveradept | Snowflake Challenge 02026 #6: The Top Ten

snowflake_challenge has sent up number 6 on the challenge list, and it's one of the ones I struggle more with than not, the recommendations-related one.

Every challenge we try to make at least one rec post, and each year, we try to find a new way to make it fun for everyone. This year's attempt:

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.

This is one of those situations where being profoundly multifannish is a disadvantage, because a top ten list of anything may or may not make it to me. Or I might not get so deeply into a fandom to where there would be enough material for a top ten list. And while I read and enjoy the gifts that get sent my way in the various exchanges that I participate in, they don't necessarily cohere to any kind of top ten list of anything, either.

Eventually, a random idea will settle into my head, and I can go forward with it and see what might happen from there. So, here you are:

10) The Blue Falcon. I didn't hear him much in that particular role, because I didn't generally watch a lot of Dyno-Mutt, but it's one of the few times that he's playing an actual animated character, rather than being someone who is reading out some amount of narration. (Which is probably where you've heard him more from.)

As an aside, somewhere on the Internet I heard that the narrator for Rocky and Bullwinkle wasn't going at the clip that Jay Ward wanted him to for the various "next time on" and so forth, and so Jay set his script on fire and got the speed he wanted as the narrator was desperately trying to read the remaining copy before it turned to ash.

9) Space Ghost. Same issue here, although I think people know Space Ghost just as much, if not more, for the talk show where he was the main character than for the animated series he was part of. (Why yes, I did grow up on a fair chunk of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons, why do you ask?) Honestly, from what I've seen of both, Space Ghost works better as a talk show host than as a superhero.

8) Garfield (and friends). The actual problem with Garfield is that there are only so many jokes that can be told regarding Garfield, and then you start replicating and remixing them. Even in an animated form, Garfield doesn't do all that much to give you opportunities for jokes, so I realized pretty quickly that I liked the U.S. Acres parts of those episodes a lot more, since at least there were a few more personalities to bounce off of. But whenever there needed to be someone to do some announcing or narration, he was usually the person there, and doing his very best to work his way through all of the material in front of him so as to get up and deliver the gag.

7) The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. It wouldn't be nearly the kind of delightful animated serial that it is without his narration, and very much his interactive narration, that made the show go. Snidely is chewing the scenery (as a vaudevillian villain should) and that leaves us with the narrator as the greatest check and disapprover of his evil deeds. It was a lot of fun to listen to him while doing research for a Perils fic that I wrote, just to make sure I got the cadence and the use of super superlatives correctly.

6-5) Sesame Street. Yep. Like so many of the celebrities of his day, he got Sesame Street Cred by doing what he did best - navigating narration and voice-over for whatever needed doing. (He got plenty of practice at it by reading ad copy for the radio, and probably also because he did a fair amount of comedy work on Laugh-In (Sock it to me?) and on the radio, as well, where someone who has a smooth and deadpan delivery can do all kinds of comedy and only getting noticed for it later.

4) As Himself. On the radio, and in more than a few places, he would show up as himself, or with one hand cupped over his ear, in homage to the old radio announcers who needed to do such a thing so they could hear what they were sounding like to the viewers. When asked why he did this, of course, he was likely to produce some other reason, properly nonsensical, and proclaim that to be the reason why he was doing it. But he was really good at being that voice on the radio, or the television, or any number of other places. He's probably better known for all the cameos he makes in other places and shows than he is for a lot of the roles that he played where he was actually a character, instead of a narrator or an announcer.

3-2) Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, and Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier. Sadly, the only two games from Sierra's Space Quest series to get the "talkie" treatment, and what better way to work through all of the many, many times that Roger's going to end up dissolved, eaten, shot, destroyed, and any of the other methods that will be employed to get you to a game over screen during both of these games than to have this iconic voice narrating both your every failure and your various successes, with exactly as much snark as is put into the text boxes about the various actions you do and don't take during the game. Things like "Your reach is about as great as your personal depth" and "By the way, you might want to look up the meaning of 'churlish' before you do something 'stupid.' " Very definitely something that you wanted to have him doing, just so that you didn't have a situation of the narrator ending up corpsing and ruining the take from the joke before he managed to get the dialogue out. And because there's an awful lot of silly in those games that he had to navigate with professionalism.

1) Dirk Niblick of the Math Brigade!If you know, you know, and you're also a specific age or so, because you were watching after-school television when Square One TV was on. As educational television went, Square One was very good, managing to work mathematics and related concepts into just about every sketch, game show, and serial that they did, including the ones where Dirk Niblick helped prevent various scams from happening to his neighbor and otherwise doing good with maths. Mathnet was the police procedural parody, Dirk Niblick was much more a math problem-cliffhanger sort of thing, but it's the kind of thing that works extremely well because once again, we have something that's meant to appeal to small children who like silly things happening along with the learning part that goes with it. Dirk also gets top billing because at a convention I went to last year, he appeared in one of the slides of the presenter, and those of us who recognized him for who he was were also pigeonholed as being about a certain age, because, again, that's what happens when you grow up with a specific kind of after-school programming diet.

So what's this a top ten of? Roles that Gary Owens played throughout his lifetime that I listened to and enjoyed. Not exactly something that has any current fandoms involved, because he's been dead for more than ten years at this point, but if you go diving into the television and animations of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as well as any recordings of his disc jockey days, you'll find him in all kinds of places, and with the voice he has, he'll stand out to you. (Much of what he's done is on various video sites, because while it may not be completely out of copyright, it's definitely worth it to keep circulating the tapes of him and his work.