Transition Announcer

A booming, unseen voice that pops up between scenes to hype whatever's coming next, usually in the overheated cadence of a 1950s newsreel or movie trailer. He never appears on screen and isn't part of the plot — he's the show's own hype man, narrating transitions with total sincerity.

Billy West's pitch-perfect send-up of old broadcast bombast turns a purely functional device — the scene-transition announcer — into one of the show's reliable sources of throwaway jokes. The gag works because he never winks at the audience; the deadpan grandiosity applied to mundane sci-fi nonsense is the whole joke.