After having had that voice on well-produced nature content for my entire life, I find most other nature-documentary voice-overs quite jarring.
Yes! I think it's not just familiarity, what makes him definitive is a combination of factors: fantastic voice and deep domain knowledge and his very clear love and enthusiasm for nature.
You can get an actor with a great voice, Morgan Freeman or Tom Hiddleston or whoever, but you always know they're just reading from a script and probably don't know any more about the animals than you do.
And there are other experts with a knack for presenting, people like Mary Beard, but you can't just transfer that knowledge to a completely different subject area.
Yes! I think it's not just familiarity, what makes him definitive is a combination of factors: fantastic voice and deep domain knowledge and his very clear love and enthusiasm for nature.
You can get an actor with a great voice, Morgan Freeman or Tom Hiddleston or whoever, but you always know they're just reading from a script and probably don't know any more about the animals than you do.
And there are other experts with a knack for presenting, people like Mary Beard, but you can't just transfer that knowledge to a completely different subject area.