Who ARE Those People? Part 5: Tick-Tock, TANK and TINK!

Many of the characters who appear in my Random Access features and promos seem be somewhat mechanized by virtue of the way they sound. One of my earlier voice actors who still makes occasional appearances is Tick-Tock. Not to be confused with the Tick-Tock of the certainly more famous OZ stories, my Tick-Tock is a relatively mellow fellow who, like Bix Nix, speaks with a slight lisp. Likewise, as he does speak, he also produces a small blipping motor sound. At the conclusion of each significant sentence, there is also a beep. While Tick-Tick's voice is contemporary in a Windows 95 sense, his clicking noise was first heard in the UPA cartoons of the 1950's while the beep is the same tone that Rosie the Robot makes in Hanna Barbera's The Jetsons. The actual source for this pulsed 1400 Hertz sound is the advisory signal required by law here in the States when one is recording a telephone conversation.

Tick-Tock has a cousin whose name is TANK, which is appropriate since TANK is a man(?) of few words and TANK is the only word he says. TANK's voice is several octaves deeper and his motor sound is an equally deep throbbing effect which I created using a self-sourced fart severely dropped in pitch and looped to simulate a machine sound. TANK's beep is also vintage. You can chronicle this effect back to Rocky and Bullwinkle and earlier UPA features.

TINK is TANK's girlfriend who, like TANK, is heavily mechanized. Unlike TANK though, TINK has no problems asserting herself and has been known to chat on incessantly. For her motor sound, I was able to locate a more delicate effect, which sounds remarkably similar to the "I'm sorry, I didn't get that!" Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop-Boop you hear when you call the Fandango Entertainment Line. TINK's beep is the same is TANK's but they are not related. In fact, they have gone out together but TINK plays the field. She has dated the expansive Bob the Extraterrestrial on a number of occasions.

Since what it is I do for This Week in Amateur Radio is an audio-only medium, character design is restricted solely to how they might sound. For that reason, I usually do not visualize what they might actually look like, as one would developing a cartoon character for film or television. However, in the case of TANK and TINK, I immediately saw them both as looking like the bullet-shaped white and silver waste paper cans you might see in a rest room or in a cheesy hotel lobby. In fact, both My Number One And Only Son Zachary and George's daughter Jessica have rendered their own images of what these folks might look like. Maybe I can find a way to post these pictures so stand by!