NEW YORK, July 31 (UPI) -- Jackson Beck, whose career ranged from radio's "Popeye" in the 1930s to TV's "Saturday Night Live" has died at his home in New York at the age of 92.
A radio actor and TV announcer, Beck's was perhaps best known for the introduction to the "Superman" radio show -- "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive."
But the Los Angeles Times says that Beck's deep voice was a radio and television fixture for decades. Long after radio's glory days had ended, Beck was announcing television shows and providing narration for commercials, cartoons and Woody Allen movies as well as narrating parody commercials on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
Historian Anthony Tollin said that Beck was unique.
"If you wanted a Jackson Beck-like voice, you had to get Jackson. There was no one else like him," Tollin told the newspaper.
Beck said in a 1990 interview that he treated his voice as a business.
He was a founding member of the union that eventually became the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists and held office in the New York local and the national union.
