Don Pardo's announcements for Zappa

Dominick George "Don" Pardo (February 22, 1918 - August 18, 2014) was a renowned radio and television announcer. Since the 1940s, Pardo was been an in-house announcer for NBC. He was the final of the "lifetime" employee announcers at NBC to keep on working, following the retirement of Howard Reig along with the death of Fred Facey.

You may not have recognized Pardo on the street, however as the former “Price Is Right” and “Jeopardy!” announcer, countless American from any generation would identify his voice. Though well-known for his work off-camera, Pardo additionally turned up in comedy sketches, particularly the show’s game show parodies, both on “SNL” and off.


As a staff announcer at NBC on November 22, 1963, he read the first account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in a voiceover on the NBC Television Network.

As of his death on August 18, 2014, he had been a constant staff member (with the last remaining lifetime contract) of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for 70 years, 64 days. To express this in an alternative way, he was a continuous employee of NBC for a complete of 25,631 consecutive days, since being employed as a NBC Radio staff announcer on June 15, 1944.

But his SNL work was not just limited to announcing. In a December 1976 SNL episode he performed with Frank Zappa reciting a verse from the tune I'm the Slime. Later, he was part of the live-recorded version of the song on 1993 re-release of the Zappa in New York album. He  supplied vocal announcements for the album  Läther, most memorably during Punky's Whips, I'm The Slime and Legend Of The Illinois Enema Bandit.

Pardo's musical repertoire also involved a cameo on "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1984 song I Lost on Jeopardy which was a parody of the Greg Kihn Band's 1983 hit Jeopardy.

Pardo also voiced himself in the Simpsons season 21 episode "Moe Letter Blues" along with the season 24 episode "Moonshine River",