Re: Rank The Announcers
 

As an announcer myself, I have always tried to follow the lead of those announcers who I really look up to. Blair and Ron are two of those announcers who I try to model my style after, and they did a great job at nats (eventhough Blair was an MC...which kinda threw me off, I felt he should have been announcing the finals, with all due respect to the Einstien Announcer). As for MC...Mark Leon is just amazing. Its difficult enough just walking around the field and trying to get a crowd going...this man brings so much enthusiasm and energy to the field, its a wonder why he doesn't drop in the middle of the floor. Great job guys!

-Andy Grady

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

From what I understand some of the volunteers working field reset were feeding him lines. I never really heard any of them because I only saw my team's matches, but D@ve (who volunteered on Archimedes field reset) told me afterwards that they were taking random lines out of newspaper articles and making other things up and giving them to Dan during the matches. I will have to rewatch some other matches to see just how quirky they were.

-Tom

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

You mean things like "The balls dropped like a bunch of lemmings. L-E-M-M-I-N-G-S."? You can blame his teammates for that one, we were giving him a hard time about it the night before :cool:

For those not aware, there's a little game going on when Dan announces whereby someone passes him slips of papers with strange words on it that he's required to work into the play-by-play. It certainly makes for some strange comments. My favorite at MWR had something to with Beatty and being "all over them like cheap cologne!"

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

The Galileo announcer was extremely confused, even more confused than I thought now that I watched the Galileo eliminations on Soap. First he called us East Hartford, then South Windsor, then he said something like "South Windsor battling UTC" which are both references to our team. Later, he said "Here come the Aztechs!", which I believe was referring to us.
:confused:

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

This all started with Blair. The field crew has been doing this with him for years. I had the pleasure of being head ref while he was announcer in Portland, and we would feed him lines. I would be sitting in front of him, reffing the match, and he would give out the "phrase" as it would fit in to the situation. He would say a phrase, and we would all crack up while trying to keep our "game faces" on.

One time, he had to say "pork products". It took him 4-5 matches, but a robot fell over and he responded with "oooh, (team name) is laying on the floor like a bunch of pork products" - or something like that. It would've been a qualifying match on Friday, if I remember.

So... I conveyed this idea to Dan and challenged him to do the same. He was up for the challenge in Chicago at the Midwest Regional and it snowballed from there. We would pass notes to him in Chicago, and everyone got a good kick out of it.

Just remember... it all started with Blair. Blair IS the man.

Andy B.

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

Is that what the whole purple balls looking like asparagus thing was at MWR? i got a kick out of that.

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

A few of the things that dan successfully integrated into his announcing matches...

"where's my dippin' dots?"
"goats do roam in villages"
"lemmings L-E-M-M-I-N-G-S"
"I am JVN"
"Yeah, kindergarten was hard"

There are many more, but those are the ones i remember :)

I think the best one was the JVN one-- the way he phrased it was incredible -- "That robot is almost on the bar! They are saying, 'We WILL hang! We WILL get on the bar! I AM JVN!"

Anyone else who was there feel free to add! What an incredible weekend!

Tom

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

Okay,
I've heard about this one from a few people (Thanks Dan ;)) and I'm just wondering if anyone knows what match it's in. I want to check it out for myself.

I guess I'll offer a Dew to whoever posts the SOAP link with this in it.

John

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

Ah, I did not know that. Thanks for the update! And here I thought it was an original idea....

Re: Rank The Announcers
 

I missed the "I AM JVN" one but I heard the following from Dan:

lemmings l-e-m-m-i-n-g-s
top cheese
rolling around like fuzzy dice
stand-up hovercraft
sedemihcra

I hope to continue to enchance my vocabulary by listening to the great announcers of FIRST!

Ken