It's been announced that actor Christopher "Chip" Mayer died July 24 in Sherman Oaks, Calif., of natural causes. He was 57.

Born George Charles Mayer, III, he was raised in Ridgewood, New Jersey and attended Colgate University.

He made his TV debut in the 1980 ABC pilot 'Stunts Unlimited,' in which he starred as one of a group of stuntmen recruited for espionage work.

Mayer's first major TV role was in the top-rated CBS series, 'The Dukes of Hazzard.' He and Byron Cherry were brought in as Vance and Coy Duke for the 1982-3 season after stars Tom Wopat and John Schneider walked out in a contract dispute.

They're heard, but not seen. TV show narrators have set the scene for viewers for decades, their familiar voices cluing us into what to expect (or how to react) to certain plot developments. And more often than not, these off-screen narrators are well-known celebrities -- making their comments and asides all the more familiar and comforting.

While compiling a list of our five favorite celebrity narrators, only two stipulations were used: First, this list only deals with scripted american programming. Documentaries don't count, nor do any overseas imports. Second, the narrator in question can not have appeared on screen as a regular character on the series (although in some instances, the narrator is a future version of the main character, played by a different actor).

That being said, here are our five ...

... Four Small Screen to Big Screen flops.

It had to be bad movies, because I couldn't think of four TV shows that have been made into good movies. The bar was set pretty high with The Brady Bunch Movie when they decided to go full-on campy. Sure, there have been some decent efforts like Starsky & Hutch and the dark and brooding Miami Vice. But this is the time for my inner Grinch to let loose and call out the bad ones, and there are a lot of them. It's too bad I can't take the TV Squad crystal ball and write about the ones still in the pipeline, like Wilder Valderrama in the CHiPs movie, or 2008's The A-Team movie. I pity the fool who tries to displace Mr. T.

Since the TV show adaptations were a bit thin this year (and I have a love/hate thing with Miami Vice. Love Michael Mann, hated the flick ... so I've decided that those cancel each other out for me, leaving a neutral effort on the floor), we're going back through the annals of the past few years and singling out some stinkers.