The following is an email recently sent to a fellow sound effects aficionado who frequents the
ToonZone Animated Cartoon Forums. I decided to also publish this email on the Random Access Thought Blog with audio links via
TWAUDIO.
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Hi Bill! Merry Christmas!
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I had mentioned in a previous transmission that I would relate some additional background information on the remarkable but truly esoteric subject of motion picture sound effects. SO! Here is more of that detail:
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MY VISIT TO UPA PICTURES!
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Back in 1979, I took a trip out to Los Angeles to visit a friend of mine, a Mister Ronald Gordon, who was trying really hard to convince me not only to visit southern California but also to live in southern California. I spent about five weeks hanging out in lovely Glendora, a typical suburban tract some sixty miles out from LA. While I ultimately did not relocate, I did spend much of that time visiting various animation houses, broadcast music syndicators and radio stations, littering each one of them with my most likely not-too-impressive resume, since at that time I had only been employed by two local radio facilities, one in here in Albany and the other in New Haven.
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I dropped by a number of AM and FM stations including KBIG and KNOB in Los Angeles, along with numerous others whose callsigns I can no longer recall. I also made a point to visit Drake Chenault which, at the time, was one of the largest purveyors of pre-programmed taped music for low-budget automated broadcast outlets. But the most fun was getting inside such studios as Hanna Barbera, Jay Ward and Walt Disney Studios.
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What I learned in these places was that you needed to be in a union to get a job but you couldn't get a job if you weren't in a union. But getting into a union was extremely difficult since there was, and presumably still is, intense internal competition for employment. Disney is in Burbank but so was UPA Pictures, which was only a few blocks away. So of course I stopped by with many questions about their editorial department and their unique effects. What I learned at UPA was that unlike HB, JW and WD, UPA Pictures "farmed out" their soundtrack work and actually did not have much in the way of audio facilities onsite. Custom music, such as the songs performed by Robert Goulet and Judy Garland for "Gay Purree!" were taped at Capitol Records, with voicetracks and sound effects recorded at other third party vendor locations.
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In fact, if you check film credits, if any, you may see names like Marne Fallis and Sam Horta (flag this name, I have more!). These names have been billed on numerous late 50's and early 60's low-budget animation efforts like "Popeye". Another fella, Phil Kaye, did effects for Rankin-Bass features like "Frosty The Snow Man" (Jacky Vernon:'Happy Birthday!'), plus all the "Roger Ramjet" stuff and some Jay Ward work, including "Super Chicken" and "Tom Slick".
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These gypsy-esque editors collected their sound effects from studio to studio along the way and deployed them from film to film along the way and this is why you, as viewer and listener, may hear sounds from Hanna Barbera or Walt Disney, in a 60's "Popeye" cartoon produced by Paramount Pictures which, by the way, had a remarkable library of their own, and which has never been released. Furthermore, many of these effects ultimately came to rest in post houses like Ryder, Edit-Rite and Producers Sound Service. I visited Producers Sound Service on the Sunset Strip just a few blocks downrange from Jay Ward, and had I been truly evil, I could have stolen reels of magnetic film containing these same effects right off the shelf in the lobby. But I was a Good Boy!
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So, when you view a "Pink Panther" cartoon and Pink is riding a bicycle making the famous Hanna Barbera squeak noise and then the bad guy flies overhead in a jetplane that sounds like the "Rocky The Flying Squirrel" sound, know that some freelance sound editor came through those doors, did some editing and left copies of those marvelous effects behind in their library as he or she moved on to the next assignment. The ending to this story is sad though because companies like PSS and Edit-Rite did finally close their doors, What became of their libraries? Who is to know?
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THE STORY BEHIND STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES SLIDING DOOR EFFECT!
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Back in the early 1960's, if you were watching TV on a typical Saturday night, you were most likely watching "My Three Sons" (because what else was there to do back then), which starred Fred MacMurray and William Frawley. The program was sponsored by Hunt's Tomato Ketchup (or Catsup). One fairly persistent theme and catch phrase for Hunt's was that "It takes one whole fresh tomato to make one bottle of Hunt's Tomato Ketchup". While this slogan was smoothly intoned by an unseen, offscreen and uncredited voice-over announcer, the camera lens (and our electronic, though analog, third eye) focused on an empty ketchup bottle. A human hand missiles in and places one whole fresh tomato on top of the one completely empty bottle. There is a
"hiss-squeak-thump" noise as the tomato miraculously slips right into the bottle! 60's special effects! How cool was that? It was a neat sound and while the effect never did appear in any cartoons (to the best of my knowledge), it did show in an episode of "Hogan's Heroes" as a flag popping out of a cannon and a couple of times in "Bewitched", when Samantha had a power failure.
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But the Hunt's Tomato effect does live on in truncated form. The "hiss-squeak" part was somehow appropriated, and, with a little audio compression added to give some heft, this same sound is now heard as the sliding doors on the USS Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Original Series" (STOS). This clip, along with all the other STOS effects, was made available some years back on a consumer CD produced by Crescendo Records. I don't know if the compact disc is still in print, but many copies are available on eBAY. According to the liner notes, The sound was created by recording a pneumatic airgun and then playing it backwards. I have rendered the effect in reverse myself and it sounds like a plan to me.
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THE HORTA, THE BATHTUBS, THE GENERATORS AND THE TRANSPORTERS!
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One of the sound guys who worked on the original "Star Trek" series was Sam Horta. This name is frequently seen in sound editor credits, especially in 70's vintage Filmation cartoons, like the "Archies", "Fantastic voyage" and "Star Trek: The Animated Series" and also more recently with "Ren and Stimpy". When access to the Internet became commerically available by the mid 1990's, I hoped to seek out and contact Sam but sadly he passed away at just around the same time. But Sam lives on in name as well because one of the many cockamamie alien species encountered by Kirk and Spock were the silicon-based cold-stone lifeforms known as the Horta!
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I had mentioned in a previous email that, at Hanna Barbera, many new effects were created out of existing sounds. Included in this transmission is an mp3 containing the so-called
UNNNG bathtub sound plus additional familiar derivatives of the same effect, which goes to show you can get more bang for the buck through audio recycling! Also included is a short clip of the
GENERATOR effect restored fairly close to its original frequency and pitch. This is what you may want to listen for should you decide to scope out the "UFOs-through-the-tollbooth" scene in "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind".
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One other
noise I'll toss in for this session is a vibrato-like effect usually heard during the transport sequence in STOS. Like the sliding door, this sound has become synonymous with "Star Trek" but predates the series by upwards of eight years. You can hear this twang in "Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol" when the titled character is seen careening around his bed in the morning after his experience with the three ghosts of Christmas. Also too, in "Gay Purree", as Jean Tom spies a mouse, his feline talons come popping out of his paws just prior to launch.
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That's it for this time. More stories later! I hope you had a Merry Christmas and all the best to you and your family for a Very Happy New Year!
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Bill
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