Why are fire alarms in movies and TV always unrealistic?

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I kind of did know that.

They should do a cartoon, or some of the still airing cartoons, like Arthur, or any PBS or kid show from other networks should do an episode of a deaf person and the fire alarm goes off only he cannot hear it and there's no one to tell him, at least not immediately. And then later in the episode strobe lights or other flashing lights are installed so that when the fire alarm goes off again in his presence, he'll know for sure (provided the light is labelled "Fire" or "Fire Alarm." Well it's not all that necessary since it's a cartoon but it would help.)

They're still interesting to me though regardless of their purpose.

Strobe lights also make it more obvious that fire alarms are going off, even to non-deaf people, but that's just how I see them. True we don't really need them unless we're deaf, still, I highly value their existence, but again, that's just me.

The movie "Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life," saw it on Netflix, uses realistic fire alarms that go off when the sprinklers are set off. The alarm sound is the same as the one used in two of the Clarence (Cartoon Network) episodes. The strobe lights also actually flash in the movie!

You can barely hear the fire alarms though because a song is played over it.

In case you want to know the song, it's "Classic" by MKTO.

If anything they seem to be less dramatic to me.

In my first year of uni, I was awoken by a terrifying noise at around 2-3AM. It turned out to be a drill fire alarm but I genuinely felt for the first few seconds that nuclear war had broken out. It also seemed to be accompanied by strange lights and colours.

I'm always fun to watch movies and TV with because I always point these things out. Another one that drives me nuts is that smoke will instantly set off all the sprinklers. That doesn't happen and even if you wanted to do it you couldn't.

One interesting fact was when I switches schools in 1992 the fire and class bell sounds were flip flopped. In other words, school #2 had loud annoying recess bells and a quiet fire alarm that went 'bing...... bing.... bing'.

Every school I've been to always used bells for fire alarms.

They sound more pleasing in games, movies, and tv to me. I hated how they sounded when I had drills up til High School.

I can't remember what my grade school fire alarm sounded like. But I don't remember it being THAT loud. I also enjoyed fire drills, because they usually happened so late in the school day the teacher was like, "We're already outside. I have papers to grade. Ya'll go play for a while."