One of the best-known voices in the world has fallen silent. Don LaFontaine, the voiceover artist most people knew as “the movie-trailer guy,” died over the weekend at the age of 68, from a collapsed lung. According to his bio, LaFontaine recorded the narration for roughly 5,000 trailers over the years, as well as countless TV ads. He even parodied himself — and his usual catchphrase, “in a world where…” — in episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, as well as a recent commercial for Geico Insurance.

I heard LaFontaine’s deep, occasionally intimidating voice nearly every day for the five or so years I worked at that multiplex I’m always waxing nostalgic about. Every couple of hours, when the next round of shows was starting, it would boom out from the auditoriums, sometimes even after the doors were closed. He was as much a part of the atmosphere in that place as the smell of popcorn and windex. I remember I used to have this embarrassing fantasy that one day I’d hear him say my name in a trailer, something along the lines of, “From the bestselling novel by R. Jason Bennion comes a film of exquisite awesomeness…” Ah, well. C’est la vie, I suppose.

Here’s a video clip that I’ve seen in a few places around the ‘nets today, a brief bio of LaFontaine that feels like something made for an awards show (the Oscars perhaps? I haven’t been able to find out…) and includes a fair amount of the man himself chatting about his life and career. It sounds very much like he was just a guy with a unique talent who stumbled into a niche that he was able to make his own. He also sounds like he was a very cool guy:

If only I’d known that he was willing to do things like voicemail intros for random strangers!

There are a lot of voiceover artists out there and I’m sure many of them, if not most of them, are very good at what they do. But I doubt we’re going to hear a single voice as universally recognizable — and recognized — as LaFontaine’s for many years.