The wonderful voice you hear on the Harry Potter audio books belongs to the seasoned Broadway actor, Jim Dale. This award winning actor started doing the voice over for Harry Potter books eight years ago. Mr. Dale has successfully been able to incorporate many different characters and voices into the script and has done so magnificently. Although hesitant at first to take on the project, Mr. Dale did so at the golden age of 71. He even won a Guinness World Record award for being able to create 134 character voices in the Order of the Phoenix. Each time a new book in the Potter series is released, an audio version goes out at the same time. That means that Mr. Dale must stay on top of things to make sure that all audio is ready by a set deadline date.
In all, Jim Dale has created over 200 separate voices for all of the Potter audio versions. And, to his credit, more than 5 million copies of these wonderful audio books have been sold since 1999. This beats the world record for the best-selling audio books of all time.
The Harry Potter audio series has some interesting facts attached to it. It would take you five full days (117 + hours) to listen to the entire series in unison. To listen to the entire series in your car would mean driving at 60 miles per hour from New York to Seattle to Los Angeles to Atlanta and back to New York. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows consists of 17 CDs or 12 cassettes and over 635,000 copies of the audio version were ordered when the book first came out.
Listening to anything in the Potter series is a wonderful escape from reality. The books have become a worldwide phenomenon and are loved by people of ages. The recordings made by Jim Dale are definitely worth listening to – They are an absolute delight! He makes Harry Potter audio books something that can’t be missed for their pure listening pleasure. He is brilliant and no one compares to him according to Anita Silvey, a well-know children’s book expert.
Source by Matt Murren
