NBC Television
In the early 1950s, he served as announcer for many of RCA's and NBC's closed-circuit color television demonstrations. He eventually became one of the top game-show announcers for the network.
Pardo made his mark on game shows for NBC as the booming voice of the original The Price Is Right from 1956 until it moved to ABC in 1963, then Call My Bluff. The next year, he moved to Jeopardy!, which he announced from 1964 until the original version of the series ended in 1975. Pardo reprised that role with a cameo voiceover in "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1984 song "I Lost on Jeopardy" (a parody of the Greg Kihn Band's 1983 hit song "Jeopardy"). He also announced numerous other New York–based NBC game shows, such as Three on a Match, Winning Streak, and Jackpot!, all three of which were Bob Stewart productions.
Pardo squeezed in many other assignments at NBC, including the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (until 1999), WNBC-TV's Live at Five news program, NBC Nightly News, and Wheel of Fortune (during two special on-location weeks in 1988, when the show originated from New York and was using substitute announcers after Jack Clark's death).
Pardo was the on-duty live booth announcer for WNBC-TV in New York and the NBC network on November 22, 1963, and he was first to announce to NBC viewers that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. (His first bulletin interrupted a local WNBC-TV broadcast of Bachelor Father before the NBC network went live with the story.) Because NBC waited eleven minutes to begin videotaping the coverage, it was believed for decades that Pardo's historic bulletins were lost; but, almost 40 years later, an audio tape of the bulletins was discovered in a private collection.
In January 1986, Don Pardo replaced Hal Simms as announcer on the NBC soap opera Search for Tomorrow. He was the announcer until the final episode, on December 26, 1986.
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