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SPEAKER_07: If you watched cartoons as a kid, you probably knew instantly that the sound you just heard was from Looney Tunes. You probably also know that sound meant Wile E. Coyote failed to catch the Roadrunner again. It's pretty crazy how we can fill in the whole scene based solely on the sound effects, even without a single meet meet from the Roadrunner.
SPEAKER_07: Wile E. Coyote started falling off cliffs in 1949. Yet we still hear that falling sound effect in modern cartoons like Teen Titans. I wouldn't stand there if I were you.
SPEAKER_07: Here it is in Justice League action.
SPEAKER_01: How do you do that? It defies the laws of physics. And here it is even in Family Guy.
SPEAKER_07: It's been almost 70 years since the first Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and that sound, along with many other cartoon sounds, remains constant.
SPEAKER_01: The beauty and the joy of cartoon animation is that the characters do not have to obey the laws of physics. They also don't have to obey the laws of logic. And therefore, sound doesn't have to obey those laws either.
SPEAKER_07: That's Mark Mangini, an Oscar winning sound designer who works with the Formosa Group.
SPEAKER_01: I don't very often get to talk about my early days in cartoons.
SPEAKER_07: Mark doesn't get a lot of questions about cartoons because he has an impressive resume designing sounds for Hollywood blockbusters.
SPEAKER_01: I've worked on a hundred and forty two live action films, most recently Blade Runner 2049, Mad Max Fury Road, which I won an Oscar for and I'm very proud of. Warrior, Gremlins, four Star Treks, a Die Hard, a Lethal Weapon, The Green Mile.
SPEAKER_07: But before Mark did sound for films, he worked for one of the most famous cartoon studios in the world. My first job in sound was at Hanna-Barbera Studios in their sound department.
SPEAKER_01: I started as a track reader, which is a subset of sound editing where you're charged with transcribing the recordings of the voices so that the animators know when to open and close the mouths of the characters. Just keep your eye on the ball, Bonnie boy.
SPEAKER_03: That led to subsequent promotions to becoming a sound effects editor in that department at Hanna-Barbera and an apprenticeship with a number of really amazingly gifted sound editors.
SPEAKER_01: Back then, this was 1976, I didn't know anyone who was called a sound designer, but I would argue that everything that we were doing at Hanna-Barbera was every bit as designed as maybe something more profound that was being heard in a motion picture.
SPEAKER_07: Mark worked on some of Hanna-Barbera's most famous cartoons. The Flintstones, some Huckleberry Hounds, a whole raft of Scooby-Doos,
SPEAKER_01: The Super Friends,
SPEAKER_01: and my personal favorite because it starred Mel Blanc, Captain Caveman.
SPEAKER_07: Long before Mark worked for Hanna-Barbera, and even before Wile E. Coyote was falling off cliffs, Walt Disney made history with Steamboat Willie in 1928. This was the first cartoon with synchronized picture and sound.
SPEAKER_01: Walt and Roy and Ub Iwerks themselves would be the sound effects guys in their live orchestral recording sessions for those early Steamboat Willys. In the early days before there was multi-track recording or mixing, you had to perform the sound effects live with the orchestra in one straight pass. So these sound effects guys had to assemble props, put them in front of microphones, and perform anything that they could acoustically live and in sync with the orchestra.
SPEAKER_07: Music and sound effects had to be performed at the same time in the same space. Musical instruments were used to make the effects because they were easy to find and easy to manipulate. In this Tom and Jerry clip, the sound of a frying pan hitting Tom's face is played by a cymbal crash. And that falling whistle from the beginning of the episode? That's played on a slide whistle. The percussionist would probably have it as part of their kit, and it was just a natural to convey going up
SPEAKER_01: or down. You could manipulate them in any one of a number of ways very quickly or very slowly.
SPEAKER_07: Sound effects played by musical instruments became an iconic part of all cartoons. Then new audio technology in the 1930s allowed sound editors to add sound effects after recording the orchestra. They could use any prop to make a sound, but often still chose musical instruments. And because sound effects and music were tightly linked, they worked together to create unique soundscapes. Listen to this audio clip from the very first Bugs Bunny cartoon called Porky's Hair Hunt. In it, you can get an idea of how effects and music can come together.
SPEAKER_05: Go get him, Zero. Get that, uh, rabbit.
SPEAKER_07: The sounds for Porky's Hair Hunt were created by an editor named Treg Brown. Treg worked on Looney Tunes for decades and created many of the iconic cartoon sounds we still know today.
SPEAKER_01: Once we divorced ourselves from the need to record live to picture, Treg had this fundamental understanding of how to decontextualize a sound, how to take the sound of your finger in a Coke bottle and make that the sound of the Roadrunner tongue flip. Or why the sound of an inertia starter, the sound of this motor that makes a biplane engine start, why that's the sound of a spinning Tasmanian devil. He learned to be a genius at taking sounds out of one context and placing them in another context.
SPEAKER_05: And that's what made him so amazing. And when you listen to those Looney Tunes shorts,
SPEAKER_01: there isn't a lot of cartoon music or music that you can play. There's a lot of music that you can play. And it's a very unique experience. And that's what made him so amazing. And when you listen to those Looney Tunes shorts, there isn't a lot of cartoon sound in those. There isn't a lot of comedic sound. It's all blood on his ability to take a sound from somewhere else and put it where it didn't belong, creating this bizarre juxtaposition that made it funny. And I don't think there was anybody better than he was at that. Around the same time, Treg was working at Warner Brothers, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera were creating the Tom and Jerry cartoons at MGM.
SPEAKER_07: Mark's mentor, Greg Watson, was a sound editor on those early Tom and Jerry cartoons. When I met him, he was in his 60s, late in his career, but immensely proud to be still working in cartoons.
SPEAKER_01: He still saw it as an art form, something he's very proud of. And he would never take credit for anything unless I asked him, Hey, Greg, where did this come from? And he said, Oh, I remember back in, you know, 51 when Bill did this one funny scene with Jerry and we needed a funny sound and we thought it would be good to do this. He was a man that was just thrilled to be a part of the process.
SPEAKER_07: Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera eventually created their own studio. And during their 30 years of making cartoons, they created a massive library of totally classic sounds. I think they're unique, at least because of their own merit.
SPEAKER_01: They're just silly. So many of them, even out of the context of the cartoon, just sound like that's just the silliest thing I've ever heard. But then within the context of the cartoons and the way that they were used and the life that they brought to those cartoons, they just get better basking in the limelight of the animation. For instance, this sound is pretty silly on its own.
SPEAKER_07: Now imagine Tom hanging from his whiskers and the unavoidable fall as each one is plucked from his cheeks. There were hundreds of familiar sounds like this created at Hanna Barbera Studios. They had such a signature quality to themselves that it made them stand out as a unique piece of quality artwork, sonic artwork.
SPEAKER_07: In the 1960s, Hanna Barbera started selling their sound library. Other production companies like Warner Brothers use these sounds to this day. The popularity of the Hanna Barbera sound library has given cartoons an almost universal sound language. But Mark feels some sounds are overused. I was on a one man campaign to eradicate head take.
SPEAKER_01: It was this inane noise that was, again, I think a recording accident that you would use whenever a character all of a sudden caught themselves in the midst of thinking or experiencing something bizarre. And it was way overused. And did you ever notice how it sounds when a cartoon character runs?
SPEAKER_07: Mark's not a fan of that one either. That running sound was called Blop Gallop and again, a sound that was, I felt overused and I tried to not use it as often as I could.
SPEAKER_01: That's illogical, but I tried not to use it as often as possible. It's a testament to its effectiveness. But even in 1976, I was turning into an elitist, I suppose. How embarrassing.
SPEAKER_07: Of course, there are plenty of sounds that Mark loves, like a tiptoeing xylophone.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's a classic sound. I have actually used that sound. I did the two Flintstone live action movies and I did use it in that because that was a sound that Brian Levant, the director, and I just loved. And we just couldn't avoid using that. My favorite was the Jetsons Spaceships. And I never found out what those were made from. I tried to deconstruct them. I asked around the studio if they know who made them and nobody knew. But that sound always brings a smile to my face.
SPEAKER_07: Sadly, some of these old techniques have been lost. But remember, this was a busy studio and everyone was focused on getting the work done on time and getting cartoons on air.
SPEAKER_01: It was a real machine. It always started with track reading. This is Ballpoint Puns, line one.
SPEAKER_04: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
SPEAKER_01: Which is to say, the voices would be assembled in a studio with a script and storyboards. The director of that show would walk the talent through the recording session so that you captured all the voices speaking all the lines that you needed for that particular episode. Just watch the birdie. Okay. Then the animators would go off and then draw the characters doing these things. Then a month later, all the animation would come back in short rolls of completed scenes. Then we in the editorial department would assemble them in their storyboard order and then cut them down to show length. There wasn't like animatics in between like we have in live action. We'd assemble a show and then cut sound to it.
SPEAKER_07: When Mark was working with Hanna-Barbera, they didn't have a department dedicated to creating new sounds. If he wanted an effect that wasn't in the library, he had to find it himself. You were just kind of on your own.
SPEAKER_01: I was the most adventurous, especially for the super friends. I would go across the hall to talk to the two composers, Paul Decourt and Hoyt Curtin. And I'd ask them for musical sounds and especially synthesizer sounds so they would give me long recorded stretches of just weird noises they'd make with their synthesizers. And they would always be used as the science fiction components. If I had a spaceship or a flying saucer in an episode, that's what I'd use the electronic sounds for because that felt futuristic to me.
SPEAKER_07: Mark couldn't find the sound he wanted. He had to create it, even if he had to use his own voice. If you can't find it, you do it with your voice. It's the easiest tool to manipulate. You have total control over it.
SPEAKER_01: I use it for creatures and animals and funny noises. I did a lot of Gremlins voices for the Gremlins movies. Having fun?
SPEAKER_03: Fun! Pretty neat, huh? Neat! What is with you guys?
SPEAKER_05: I already fed you.
SPEAKER_01: It's just something where you feel the character inside of yourself and you think, I can do this better. And you just do it.
SPEAKER_07: Mark also went on to work on some of the most classic animated films. I did Beauty and the Beast.
SPEAKER_01: Aladdin.
SPEAKER_05: And The Lion King.
SPEAKER_07: Mark's experiences with animated films were different from the grind of televised cartoons.
SPEAKER_01: If nothing else, you get much better schedules. You usually get the time to design and create something that no one's ever heard before. Another sort of unique distinction is that you have the option to create sound first and then have animation be done to what you did. It's not that often that we get to actually drive the image. And on the Disney animated films and the Pixar films and the DreamWorks films and others, they're smart enough to know the value of sound and how it can be the inspiration to the artist to draw something that they might not otherwise have drawn. For example, in Beauty and the Beast, Belle's dad was this inventor and he had built that funny axe-chopping machine. That was a sound that we made before animation. Let's give it a try.
SPEAKER_05: It works! It does? It does!
SPEAKER_01: That's just pure design. That's when you get to let your imagination run wild. You can see a picture from a storyboard and then you just get to dream up what it might sound like. And that's just gold for a sound designer when you're sort of allowed to design unfettered.
SPEAKER_06: With all the cable channels and streaming services available today, there's more animation than ever before. So how does sound design work in modern cartoons and which iconic sounds are still used today? We'll get to all of that when 20,000 Hertz on 99% Invisible continues. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins and minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRS to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRS steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand.
SPEAKER_07: If you haven't watched a cartoon in years, it might surprise you that sounds from decades ago are still being used today. I use the older sound effects quite a bit still. The Hanna-Barbera library, the Warner Brothers library, it's still kind of the go-to for certain gags in certain shows.
SPEAKER_00: That's Heather Olson, an Emmy-nominated sound designer for animation. She works at Advantage Audio.
SPEAKER_07: I'm working on Star vs. the Forces of Evil for Disney XD.
SPEAKER_00: Trolls, the Beat Goes On. And Spirit Riding Free for Netflix.
SPEAKER_02: I worked on The Fairly Oddparents, Tough Puppy, Bunsen is a Beast,
SPEAKER_00: Big Goat Banana Cricket for Nickelodeon. I also worked on The Adventures of Puss in Boots for Netflix. Gravity Falls for Disney XD. And The Boondocks for Sony.
SPEAKER_07: Heather is an expert in modern cartoon sound design. Cartoon sound effects are different from live action sound effects because with live action you start with production sound.
SPEAKER_00: You're recording a picture and they're recording the audio at the same time wherever the actors are. So if they're on a street, you have cars going by. Whereas in a cartoon, if you're doing a street scene, all I get is dialogue. It's just the actors who are recorded and I get to start with a blank slate. I don't have to try to hide production backgrounds. I get to get the dialogue and I get to create a world around it. It's kind of the best thing and the worst thing at the same time to work on a cartoon because you're not trying to hide anything but you have nothing to start with. So in your head you have to think what would this sound like? Much like Mark's time at Hanna-Barbera, Heather gets a fully animated show and often adds sound effects from a ready-made library of sounds.
SPEAKER_07: This includes many from the Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers libraries. Here are some of her favorites.
SPEAKER_00: It's called the Tube Thunk sound effect. I think everybody knows what this sounds like, maybe not what it's called, but it's that sound like when a character gets their head stuck in a jar, you hear that thunk. I love that old sound. It just so clearly conveys my head is stuck in this jar and it's not coming out again. And I also love all the old running sounds.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm using the xylophone blink all the time. Those sounds I think have just persisted in everybody's mind and in every show because that's the language that we've started to understand. So when someone blinks you kind of expect to hear that xylophone at this point.
SPEAKER_07: And of course, Heather uses the falling whistle.
SPEAKER_00: I think in our sound effects library it's called Bomb Drop, but it's the same thing. I mean, that's another piece of the language that everybody knows.
SPEAKER_07: Since some of the shows she works on are more realistic, Heather wants us to hear the sounds of the characters moving around and interacting with their world, kind of like a live action movie. The Foley department really brings the show to life. They record footsteps, things characters touch, which we call props.
SPEAKER_00: They do more of the smaller sounds and it's great to have Foley doing that instead of a library because then you're not hearing the same footsteps over and over. They really make it sound more real.
SPEAKER_07: And just like in the past, if you can't find a sound, you have to make it. One of the stranger things I've actually recorded and done myself for a sound effect is we had a bit in Robot Monster where everyone was in a crowded restaurant.
SPEAKER_00: So it was supposed to be this crowd of people gagging and grossed out by something. And that's not exactly an effect I had sitting around my library. So I grabbed a bunch of people around the office and we recorded ourselves gagging in lots of different ways. And then I kind of pieced it all together into a crowd.
SPEAKER_07: Sometimes layering multiple sounds together is the best way to create something new. An odd combination that you might not expect, and I did not invent this, animals and engines is a really great one.
SPEAKER_00: For animal roars, under engines, growls, it really kind of brings a vehicle to life. A lot of shows do it. But Star Wars, definitely the TIE fighters, there's some growls under there as they go by. It's fantastic. Inspiration. Another option Heather has is to take a classic library sound and change its pitch to make a new effect.
SPEAKER_07: Take this cartoon boing sound effect. She can pitch that sound up or down. Heather uses a lot of classic, non-literal sounds while working on cartoons. But some modern cartoons are more realistic than slapstick. Her choices really depend on the show. So especially when we get a new show, we'll do what we call spotting the show, where the clients come in and we watch it together.
SPEAKER_00: And we kind of talk about what they'd like where and just the overall feel of the show. Like is it going to be kind of a realistic show like Spirit or is it going to be really cartoony like Fairly Oddparents? Fairly Oddparents taught me how to speak cartoon. I'm not going near that thing without the appropriate protective gear.
SPEAKER_01: It's just non-stop cartoon, cartoon, cartoon.
SPEAKER_00: Where something like Spirit, it feels more like you're making a movie with, you know, horses out in the fields with girls. What's the matter boy? Don't you remember me from the train?
SPEAKER_07: Because Spirit Riding Free has more natural sounds than a cartoon like Fairly Oddparents, Heather needed some new sounds. We got a whole new horse library because in that show there's three characters who are horses.
SPEAKER_00: So there are no actors voicing them and they each have a different personality. So we had to find kind of different vocals for each of the horses.
SPEAKER_07: But even Spirit Riding Free still sometimes needs a dose of the vintage cartoon sounds.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of times people will come in with their show and say, I don't want to use those old Hanna-Barbera sounds. I want to do something completely different. But they've kind of animated it the traditional way. So when you put new sounds to that, it just it feels wrong. And a lot of times they eventually go back to using the older sound effects.
SPEAKER_07: When it comes to cartoon sound design, Mark and Heather both agree that the medium pushes the boundaries of creativity.
SPEAKER_01: Characters stretch unnaturally out of their body shapes. You know, those are just the simplest examples of visually what's happening with these characters. So in a way, it gives you permission to break the laws of what sound you should hear when you see something.
SPEAKER_00: I really like working for animation because I like to build a world with sound from the ground up. Because in animation, the best part is you're designing a world from nothing, a world that no one's ever heard before. And sound design, I think, is a huge part of the process for animation because there's no sound except the talking. So you get to do the backgrounds and sound effects and the Foley. And I think it all combines to really bring the animation to life.
SPEAKER_01: So now there's so many tools that anyone can get their hands on. You're really free to design sound in any way your imagination desires. It's important for us to follow our hearts when we follow our heart and then we make a career out of that. We make a day-to-day avocation to something that gives all of us purpose and it allows us to make a contribution to the world.
SPEAKER_06: This episode of 20,000 Hertz was written and produced by James Intricasso and Dallas Taylor with help from Sam Schneemly out of the studios of De facto Sound. It was edited, sound designed, and mixed by Nick Spradlin. The music in this episode was provided by Musicbed. You should subscribe to 20,000 Hertz. They're a great indie podcast. I'm a big fan. You'll totally dig it. We'll have a link on our website and in the show notes. 99% Invisible is a project of KALW 91.7 in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a member of radio topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars, the show and 99 P.I. org run Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit, too. But our forever home on the web is 99 P.I. .org.
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SPEAKER_04: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit? Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
