Jew World Order

    

When George Lucas began work on Star Wars in the mid-1970s, he tapped a USC classmate to craft all the strange sounds for this risky sci-fi movie about a sheltered kid on a distant planet who ends up saving the galaxy. That man was Ben Burtt, who spent about a year coming up with different ideas for, say, how a Wookie talks or the exact combination of human and electronic sounds needed to bring a droid to life.

As Burtt later told an interviewer, “Since we were going to design a visual world that had rust and dents and dirt, we wanted a sound world that had squeaks and motors that may not be smooth-sounding or quiet. Putting in sounds from the real world creates the illusion that these fantasies are credible.”

Almost 40 years after its premiere, Star Wars is such a cultural colossus that even its sound effects are ingrained in our subconscious. For that, you can thank Burtt, who has won two competitive Oscars and two special-achievement Oscars, and has gone on to work on such projects as E.T., the Indiana Jones films and Wall-E. Once asked what makes a good sound designer, Burtt responded, “It boils down to the ability to select or create the right sound for the right moment, to pick the thing that dramatically tells what needs to be said in that moment.” As these six examples demonstrate below, Burtt’s sonic instincts are pitch-perfect.

Blasters

The quick, short firing sound of the blasters used by the Rebellion and the Empire stands in marked contrast to the slow, elegant hum of the other major weapon in the Star Wars universe, the lightsaber. Ben Burtt stumbled upon the precise sound by accident while on a family vacation.

As Burtt’s father Benjamin P. Burtt, a chemistry professor at Syracuse University who died in 2012, once recalled, “[B]ack in the 1970s we were on a family trip to visit [Ben’s] wife’s family and were all in some gentle hills in Pennsylvania known as the Pocono Mountains. He was at that time always carrying a Nagra recorder and getting all sorts of sound for his collection.” Climbing up a hill with his son to get a closer look at a radio tower, Benjamin grabbed a rock and struck it against the tower’s support cables. According to Benjamin, Ben remarked, “That sounds like the imaginary laser gun ought to sound!”

Chewbacca

As played by Peter Mayhew and designed by makeup supervisor Stuart Freeborn, Chewbacca is both alien and familiar, an oversized, lovable dog who just so happens to tower over everyone else and walk upright. But Mayhew didn’t produce the grunts, whimpers and wails that emanate from Chewie—those were provided by Burtt or, rather, from some friends in the animal kingdom.

“Mostly bears, with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in,” Burtt once said simply when asked how he found the sounds to create the character of Chewbacca’s voice. But it took some doing: Burtt would travel to oceanariums on the off chance that their walruses would give him just the right sound. As he would later recall about visiting Long Beach’s Marineland of the Pacific, which closed down in 1987, “Its pool had been drained for cleaning—the walrus was stranded at the bottom, moaning—and that was the sound!”

It’s remarkable now to think that Burtt had little to work from when he first designed Chewbacca’s voice. According to Burtt, Lucas had only told him that the character wouldn’t be speaking English or any other recognizable human language—and that maybe the sound of a bear would work.

Darth Vader

Does any movie villain have a simpler, more iconic sound associated with him than Darth Vader’s strained breathing through his metal mask? It’s a chilling juxtaposition—the recognizably human intake of air mixed with the robotic emptiness and echo of Vader’s suit—and it came to Burtt when he was screwing around with scuba gear.

“The original concept I had of Darth Vader was a very noise-producing individual,” Burtt has said. “He came out into a scene, he was breathing like some … windmill. You could hear his heart beating, he’d move his head you’d hear motors turning.” But the sound designer quickly abandoned that approach—”He sounded like an operating room, an emergency room”—and instead turned his attention to putting a microphone inside a scuba tank regulator.

“When you breathe through it you could hear the valve opening and closing,” Burtt told NPR in 2008. “It had a little bit of a click and clank to it. And the flow of air through the narrow rubber hoses had a really cold, very hissy quality to it. It was unreal.”

By the way, Vader’s breathing is so iconic that Lucasfilm trademarked it in 2014.

TIE Fighters

With their flat-panel wings, the Empire’s TIE Fighters seem to be ferociously cutting through space, the noise they emanate resembling a high-tech buzzsaw. It’s a sound that triggers memories of the wailing dragons or pterodactyls we’ve seen in other movies—and like those ancient beasts, the TIE Fighter is a ceaseless killing machine.

Joe Johnston, who won an Academy Award for the effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark and later directed such films as Captain America: The First Avenger, drew storyboards for A New Hope, later recalling the inspiration behind the TIE Fighters. “In World War II the super dive-bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts,” he once said. “They didn’t serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect with just a menacing appearance.”

But Burtt figured out how to make them sound just as frightening. He turned to The Roots of Heaven, a 1958 adventure film directed by John Huston, which starred Errol Flynn as part of a team trying to save African elephants from extinction. Burtt sampled the movie’s elephant noises and slowed them down, but then he hit upon the idea of mixing them with the sound of cars on wet pavement.

“Swoosh, the car would come by, and you heard this car plowing through the water,” Burt later recalled. “I took that sound still thinking that I was making a laser of some kind.” But when he tried the combination of elephants and cars with the TIE Fighter footage, the rest of the Star Wars brain trust flipped for it. “I’d really put it in because I had no other alternative,” Burtt admitted, “but it got great reviews, so naturally it became the sound of the TIE Fighters.”

R2-D2

Much like Chewbacca, Artoo is among the most alien of the central Star Wars characters: He doesn’t have facial expressions, and we can’t understand a thing he’s saying—or, rather, bleeping or blooping. Nonetheless, C-3PO’s constant companion and sparring partner is a deeply lovable droid, in large part because of the adorable, emotive collection of noises he produces.

Burtt first set about making mechanical noises for R2-D2, but he soon realized, “They all seemed to lack a sort of human quality—they seemed too machine-like.” So, he decided to try making some noises himself, imitating baby talk and then mixing it with the electronic sounds. “Our experiments led to the combination of using my voice doing baby talk, beeps and boops, with the electronic synthesizer,” he said. “So Artoo is 50 percent machine and 50 percent organic, coming out of the performance of a person.”

That percentage wasn’t quite the same on Wall-E, but that later movie also found Burtt providing the guide voice for a robot character, which was then treated with electronic effects.

The Lightsaber

A Jedi’s lightsaber is a mystical, otherworldly sword; Obi-Wan was right when he described it in A New Hope as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.”

The sound came to Burtt in pieces, first from him remembering the hum he would hear as a projectionist at the USC cinema school. “I recorded that motor,” he recalled, “and a few days later I had a broken microphone cable that caused my recorder to accidently pick up the buzz from the back of my TV picture tube. I recorded that buzz, and mixed it with the hum of the projector motor. Together these sounds became the basis for all the lightsabers.”

From there, he played the lightsaber sound through speakers, recording it with a microphone that he would wave over and around the speakers. As a result, he was able to create the sound of the lightsaber moving and striking objects.

All in all, Burtt had designed one of Star Wars‘ most lasting sonic elements by throwing out the rules of good sound. “Normally a sound person doesn’t want a buzz or a hum,” Burtt once said. “In this case, the buzz and the hum were the answers.”