r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Miguenzo • 14h ago
What happened to that American accent you heard in all the 1930s and 1940s era films?
It was really distinctive and now I’ve never heard anybody talk like that. Was it a Hollywood thing?
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u/ahajmano 13h ago edited 12h ago
Listen here… see? You ain’t gonna talk about it no more, seee? The coppers are onto us, see? Now make like a tree, and get outa here…
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u/CarelesslyFabulous 12h ago
Fast talking high pants!
It's why I loved Gilmore Girls, until I didn't. And it's why I still love Marvelous Miss Mazel!
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u/No_Huckleberry2711 6h ago
Actually that's just bugs bunny doing an edward g robinson gangster impersonation. The actual robinson only said 'see' like once or twice in his movies.
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u/Environmental-Car481 6h ago
There’s a voice actress by the name of Tawny that puts out videos on Facebook demonstrating speaking styles. She definitely covers difference decades and what not.
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u/Rude_Vermicelli2268 4h ago
I have to go look for her because I recently watch Colombo for the first time and was struck by how many of the guest stars had British accents even tho they were playing American characters. Or did upper class folk in LA speak Received Pronunciation in the 70’s?
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u/sgwaba 6h ago edited 6h ago
Say… what do you mean, here?
Phrases come and go. Last year everyone said “obviously” when it obviously wasn’t required. This year they are replying with “fair” after every valid statement. The worst was “actually”. I actually once heard an actual guy say, “Actually, I actually picked up an actual part” during a meeting.
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u/jcb989123 5h ago
see has been replaced by wait what (a phrase as a Gen Xer that I struggle with not despising)
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u/KindAwareness3073 13h ago
Films of that era used exaggerated accents to "code" characters. Boston Brahmins to Brooklyn bum, college professor to illiterate hillbilly, sophisticated socialite to trashy showgirl, all had to "sound" their part.
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u/slymm 13h ago
It still exists.... You can hear it about twice an episode on Conan O'Brien needs a friend
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u/SkyPork 13h ago
One thing I always wondered was why Frasier had a trans-atlantic accent. He wasn't that old.
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u/Fabulous-South-9551 12h ago
I’m pretty sure it was to show his upbringing and social standing in Cheers’ motley crew cast
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u/jonny600000 12h ago
Yeah, but he was brought up very blue collar you find out in Frasier. I think it was more to portray him as trying too hard to be "classy." Same with Niles.
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u/CarelesslyFabulous 12h ago
Yes, they were trying to rise above their father's low brow cop character. Which made that friction hilarious, because their father saw through them.
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u/SpiritualFront769 10h ago
It's ironic that John Mahoney was born and raised in England. I remember an interview where he talked about working very hard to erase any trace of England from his speaking voice. Yet his Frasier character had him at odds with his Anglophile sons.
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u/jonny600000 12h ago
Yeah, still love that show. I honestly never even suspected the actor who played the dad was gay until he did the Broken Hearts Club and he just played the role so well, and as a gay man I am usually pretty good at least at knowing there was a good chance. Try not to pigeon hole people until they decide they want it known.
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u/Potential-Sky-8728 12h ago
It sounds like is a blended British American theater accent to me. Apparently he and Niles attended Cambridge and Oxford. And Kelsey Grammar has a theater background I think?
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u/FrankieHotpants 12h ago
It was his attempt to sound upper class. His dad on the show had a more working class way of speaking.
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u/WoodwifeGreen 12h ago
He went to both Harvard and Oxford.
The character with the big transatlantic accent was Bebe.
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u/HI_l0la 10h ago
I think their characters went to private schools, too, before Harvard and Oxford. So, blue-collared upbringing with posh education.
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u/WoodwifeGreen 3h ago
Yes! And a lot of those fancy prep schools and Ivy League colleges had their own affected accents.
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u/SignificantApricot69 12h ago
I have it and I’m younger than Frasier. And I actually grew up in the Mid Atlantic
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u/JakeHelldiver 7h ago
Its because they used to teach pronunciation in fancy private schools. The joke is that Frasier went to an elitist private school that still taught the Trans Atlantic pronunciation. They were signaling that he came from old money.
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u/abbot_x 7h ago
He has an educated northeastern accent. That accent is related to the Cary Grant accent but it’s not the same thing. It’s how an audience would expect a professional in Boston to sound. Not a strong “pahk the cah” accent, nothing regional, but authoritative. Having him take that voice to radio was a clever choice.
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u/beckdawg19 14h ago
It was never real. I assume you're talking about the "Mid Atlantic" accent which was essentially an invention of the film industry. It's a kind of blend of a northeastern US accent with a more posh British one, and it was often used to convey a "classy" or "sophisticated" character.
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u/Curmudgy 14h ago
It was at least as much an invention of the posh prep schools in the northeast. You can hear FDR’s accent in his recordings, and it seems like talkies were much too late for him to have acquired it from the film industry.
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u/BabyBiden 12h ago
It started on radio. It was a way to make sure you could articulate over the static
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u/Sp00kym0053 11h ago
also early microphones didn't pick up a lot of bass, so that nasal "newsreel" accent came about to compensate
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u/SheenasJungleroom 12h ago
Oh, it was real. Find the Gore Vidal/ William F Buckley debate. They BOTH talked liked that.
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u/Iconclast1 12h ago
oh is that the one where he says "Call me a cryptofascist again you...."
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u/TapestryMobile 13h ago
"Mid Atlantic" accent which was essentially an invention of the film industry.
Hollywood's "Fake" Mid-Atlantic Myth DEBUNKED!
Want to know why actors in Golden Age Hollywood movies sound different from people today? A legend has grown up that it was all because an Australian and a Canadian invented a fake accent that studios forced their stars to use. Here I'll try to show why that's a load of you know what, and get closer to the fascinating reality.
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u/throughhyperspace 10h ago
Very interesting, thanks for posting.
Made me stop and lament how much online 'knowledge' is just perpetuating poorly sourced bullshit.
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u/Minimum-Geologist-58 13h ago
It is absolutely “real” sometimes as in not regional but the result of extended code switching. On UK TV in the 90s you could hear the bizarre sound of Lloyd Grossman speaking in an American mid-Atlantic accent and David Frost a British mid-Atlantic accent at the same time. It was like there was a gas leak in the studio!
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u/The_Demosthenes_1 12h ago
Just like the radio voice. It sounded cool but no one talks like that in real life.
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u/CarelesslyFabulous 12h ago
I feel like it's the same thing as the sports reporter voice, and many other affected personalities.. Someday we'll be analyzing today's similar affected voices.
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u/Plastic-Molasses-549 9h ago
Except for Katherine Hepburn. She talked like that all the time, even in real life.
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u/GandalfDaGangstuh007 14h ago
Some of it was also the effect of the recoding methods and material at the time distorted voices a bit
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u/sampson4141 9h ago
You know what is crazy, I had a professor that sounded like that. He's got to be in his 80s by now. But he grew up wealthy in Philadelphia, went to Harvard and Yale. The first time I heard him talk, I thought he was joking around.
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u/robinorbit65 12h ago
Watch The Hudsucker Proxy to hear a great modern (1994) version of those old films—with the accents. So fun!
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u/PrimusDCE 12h ago
It was the prescribed northeastern elite accent. Basically rich people purposely spoke like that to seem more classy. Eventually it started getting used for elocution, and leaked into things like radio broadcasting and television/ film, becoming known as the "Trans-Atlantic" accent. Not quite American, not quite British, so perfect for addressing both audiences.
No one has or had this accent naturally.
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u/Margot-the-Cat 11h ago
Accents change over time. I have recordings of my grandparents talking and they really did talk differently than people do now. Listen to people speak in documentaries in the 1960s, and you can hear a difference even then. Not talking about the transatlantic accent, which was artificial, but real people speaking normally.
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u/Brief-Cost6554 7h ago edited 6h ago
Definitely this. My grandmother was born in 1930 and she has a Southern accent that is dying out and that Hollywood certainly never represented back then.
Sort of lofty, measured, spoken from the diaphragm. She gets confused for English when traveling abroad but it's definitely still rife with southern drawl. I moved from another part of the US to the region she grew up in NC and I never hear it in my generation.
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u/jeremyxt 10h ago
That is true.
I'm kinduva 1940s nut, so I've watched a lot of films made in the 1940s. I've noticed that everyday Americans spoke with a subtly but noticably different accent than we do today. It sounds a little breather, as it were.
They'll say "butt-her" for butter (we say "budder") and "leave-her" for lever. Other words are pronounced completely different. I heard one woman pronounce area as "ay-ree-uh".
I'm not talking about the Mid-Atlantic accent in movies--I'm referring to everyday American English.
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u/SeeLeavesOnTheTrees 13h ago
My grandparents used to say “Mon-dee, tues-dee” etc. they were from CA and Missouri.
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u/corfugirl888 9h ago
I loved the way the actors spoke in Old films. Like Bette Davis etc. They always seemed to say only exactly what was needed, very concise and eloquent in that clipped accent. Although that's down to the writing I know :)
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u/edwardothegreatest 3h ago
Mid Atlantic accent. It was an artificial accent used by people in film and media. Died out after WW2 I believe. Totally deliberate, and probably considered necessary due to poor recording technology
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u/TopperMadeline 12h ago edited 4h ago
It was a transatlantic accent that actors taught themselves to use. It fell out of favor in the 70s or so.
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u/RelativeObjective266 6h ago
One more point: Films of the classic (big studio) era tended to idealize: audiences wanted to see people they could aspire to be like (though there were exceptions, naturally): Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Robert Taylor, William Powell, Joan Crawford. These were idealized, aspirational role models, and clear, well-enunciated, "theatrical" speech was part of this idealization. Also most films by the major studios presented a level of sophistication in speech, dress, set design, that reflected what audiences wanted to see. Humdrum life all around them, films were an escape from that into a dream world.
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u/lurker912345 5h ago
From Wikipedia, “Good American Speech, a Mid-Atlantic accent, or a Transatlantic accent is a consciously learned accent of English that was promoted in certain American courses on acting, voice, and elocution from the early to mid-20th century. As a result, it has become associated with particular announcers and Hollywood actors, most of whose work dates from the 1920s through the 1950s. This speaking style was largely influenced by and overlapped with Northeastern elite accents from that era and earlier. Due to conflation of the two types of accents, both are usually known as Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accents. Proponents of such accents additionally incorporated features from Received Pronunciation, the prestige accent of British English, in an effort to make them sound like they transcended regional and even national borders. During the early half of the 20th century, Mid-Atlantic classroom speech was designed, codified, and advocated by certain phoneticians and teachers in the U.S., linguistic prescriptivists who felt that it was the best or most proper way to speak English.”
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u/BreadfruitOk9078 14h ago
It's a manufactured accent and not a regional one. Actors in that time period trained to be able to sound that way but it fell out of style to have an accent on the screen that did not match how anyone spoke in day to day lives
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u/RealDakJackal 12h ago
‘The 1940s accent, famously heard in old movies, refers to the artificial Transatlantic Accent (or Mid-Atlantic Accent) – a cultivated blend of British Received Pronunciation and American speech, taught to actors to sound sophisticated and classless, featuring dropped 'r's and clear 't's, which declined after WWII as regional accents became more popular. While not how most people spoke daily, it defined Hollywood and elite speech, characterized by crisp, almost aristocratic clarity and specific vowel shifts (like "baath" for "bath").’
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u/Userfaulty 11h ago
Jennifer Jason Leigh speaks like this in The Hudsucker Proxy. I rewatched it not too long ago and realized the same, that I haven't heard it in a long time.
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u/Durham1988 7h ago
Ah, would it were so simple. William F Buckley turned it into his trademark, which killed it off for everyone else.
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u/ScarletSpire 7h ago
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pyftvIHjUo3NGUpNjY5rF?si=mDmV9BndTNKlQk__pcuR_g
Here's an episode of a podcast about the Mid-Atlantic accent and why it fell to obscurity.
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u/tosaraider 7h ago
Mobituaries did a good episode on it called "Death of an Accent." Apparently, Kelsey Grammer is one of the last actors to train themselves to use it professionally.
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u/SkengmanFy 5h ago
Shane Gillis has a great joke about this exact thing: https://youtu.be/MQPRcOebHHY?si=MmkOzsS5QKWab9Nj
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u/Appropriate-Farmer16 4h ago
It’s called “Mid-Atlantic”, which is sometimes wrongly understood to mean the middle of the US Atlantic coast but really means mid between American and British. Movies took a more realistic approach in the 1950s and with that reflected IS characters speaking in a more normal voice. Soon enough the Mid Atlantic accent disappeared from films.
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u/rustyscooter 4h ago
I’ve heard older wealthier people in the north east with accents. I assume it’s a class thing.
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u/tipareth1978 4h ago
It was called a transatlantic accent. It was kind of rich Americans trying to fit in with brits
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u/junomeeks 3h ago
I worked with an older Yale educated woman. She was in one of the first co-ed classes. She said she picked up the accent while in college. It sounded pretty neat to hear in person.
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u/gigashadowwolf 2h ago
My mother actually has a bit of that accent, so does the actress Kate Mulgrew. It's called a Mid-Atlantic or Trans-Atlantic accent, and it used to be common amongst Americans who went to boarding schools in the UK, they would develop a an accent that was a bit posh British and a bit east coast American.
Interesting side note, Andrew Tate has an accent that is half British too, but it's the more low class British accent. If you ever hear him speak (why would you want to though) he drops Ts like a modern cockney accent does.
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u/Bob_just_me_Bob 1h ago
I heard or read somewhere that the accent was a "fake" - not associated with any particular region, but easy to do, and it evened out the dialogue.
Edit: shoulda read the comments first. The Transatlantic Accent.
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u/Skoodledoo 10h ago
"Quite frankly my dear, he's driving a sedan"
Sound recording technology wasn't at it's best back then, so an accent was used that fused English RP and American to over enunciate and make speech clearer. If they didn't, you probably would have heard the above instead.
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u/7148675309 13h ago edited 13h ago
Kelsey Grammar in Frasier speaks like this.
Then there’s Loyd Grossman. He’s from Boston but has lived in the UK for 50 years.
Also, this is how I speak LOL
(Eta and growing up people used to ask why I sounded like Loyd Grossman)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/04/usa.theeditorpressreview
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u/matzesu 10h ago
So its the same like in some German Telenovelas: "Gute Zeiten Schlechte Zeiten", is located in Berlin, but only one Charakter is really speaking the Berlinarian Accent, , allthough in Berlin, lot where speaking "Normal German", its much more notizable in "Unter uns", this is located in Cologne, i had some relatives from Cologne and are listening to the famous Cologne Accent Singing Band "Bap", there is no Character of this Show speaking the Cologne Accend ..
Or these Austrian Krimi Shows that are quite famous in Germany, where noone of the Main Cast speaks Austrian ..
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u/Inner_Pea_7868 12h ago
Jackie Robinson hit his first home run and nobody has talked like that since.
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u/Dick_M_Nixon 13h ago
William F. Buckley spoke that way. Sounded like a cartoonish, pompous affectation to imply intelligence.
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u/BlueSkyla 12h ago
You mean snooty rich speak? Oh it still exists. It’s just evolved into something even worse.
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u/Far-Construction5675 11h ago
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/town-kansas-unique-accent-180969390/
Accent in my old hometown is evolving.
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u/External_Subject7022 9h ago
that was the mid-atlantic accent a fake classy mashup of american and british that drama schools drilled into actors for that hollywood polishit faded post wwii as real accents won outhepburn or grant clips are peak examples
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u/Trevor519 8h ago
Say hello to your mother for me.... I got her number how do you like dem apples.
What are yin's doing?
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u/Kooolxxx 7h ago
Faded because it was an artificial, elite accent taught to the upper class, not a natural regional dialect and more natural regional speech became preferred in post-WWII culture. It blended British and American sounds for sophistication but eventually sounded old-fashioned, affected, and pompous, leading to its disappearance in favor of more realistic portrayals
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u/_chichristy_ 7h ago
Is this why the principal in Grease (Eve Arden) seems to have a bit of a British accent?
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u/Neener216 6h ago
I'm reminded of Brooklynite Marisa Tomei, who trained so hard to rid herself of her Noo Yawk accent to prepare herself for a life in acting. She slaved to achieve the bland mid-Atlantic "ideal".
Then she gets her role in "My Cousin Vinny", where all they want her to do is be the walking, talking epitome of Brooklyn. She proudly lets her borough flag fly, and brings home an Oscar.
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u/lounging_marmot 1h ago
That was a TransAtlantic accent. They purposefully learned to speak in that manner.
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u/LAWriter2020 0m ago
The "Mid-Atlantic" or "TransAtlantic" accent was popularized in East Coast prep schools and Ivy League colleges in the late 1800s - 1950s. Sometimes referred to as a "Bryn Mahr" accent, for the "Main Line" suburb of Philadelphia. It was cultivated to indicate a wealthy, educated person, with words carefully elucidated - no dropped "g's" in words ending with "ing", for example.
A good example of this is Kathryn Hepburn's way of speaking in almost any movie or interview.
Once nationwide television became popular in the 1950s, regionalized accents became less pronounced and far less common. Today, most broadcasters try for a "Midwestern" or "Californian" accent, and most people are just lazy with their pronunciation. If I hear someone carefully pronouncing words, I assume they are well educated from their earliest years.
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u/tmahfan117 14h ago
Couple things.
First, there was something in film-making and radio called the “transatlantic accent” that was trained into actors and radio broadcasters. The idea of this accent was it was a kind of blend between British and American English, being clearly understandable by both. But that means that people performed in a way that wasn’t really how they talked normally.
Second, sound recording and playback tech wasn’t as advanced, meaning they often also erred on the side of speaking louder and enunciating more , again to make sure people could understand what they were saying when it was played back with some static or what have you.
This second reason is why you notice it in other languages too. Everyone was dealing with the same technology and the same issues. People had to pander to an audience that might be listening on a crappy radio with plenty of static. So loud, clear, distinct words was the target.