Remember that weird noise that a guy made falling into the tentacle pit in Return Of The Jedi? Maybe it sounded familiar. A few years ago I told my wife that every action-ish movie I saw seemed to squeeze that exact same sound sample in somewhere.
Finally, proof! You’ll be surprised to learn how long this has been going on.
John Cole
I didn’t know Howard Dean’s middle name was Wilhelm
/duck
SGEW
No, no! Don’t tell everyone about the Scream! How will we film nerds find our secret jollies when we watch the latest action flick if everyone knows about it?
I had a friend in film school who could do a dead-accurate Wilhelm Scream, whenever he wanted to. It wore real thin, real soon.
4tehlulz
Since this is the place where I first heard the term, “Alt-A“:
Oh shi-
SGEW
No, no, no. It’s “aaaaaaAAAAaah!” with an hysterical lilt about 2/3 of the way in. Then you get swallowed by the crocodile (or 1,887 different classes of mortgage securities, whatever).
Jon H
NPR’s “On The Media” had a good segment about the Wilhelm back in 2001.
Transcript at the link above, and there’s a link on the page that will load a realaudio stream of the segment.
borehole
Geez, dude, you just found out about the Wilhelm? That’s been common knowledge* for years.
*among the sort of obscurist weirdos who know things like this instead of having lives/sex
TheFountainHead
Haha, wow. I had no idea. Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest though. everyone who works in movies likes to plant their own Easter Eggs if they can.
Jon H
The funniest part in the On The Media bit is where a sound guy talks about trying to slip the Wilhelm into movies without it being pulled by the director.
Keith
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, George Lucas is going to move on to his backup plan: “The Clinton Cackle”, which in a bizarre temporal mystery, first debuted in the flying monkey scene from “The Wizard of Oz” and gained regular usage during the HBO series “Tales From The Crypt”.
Rheinhard
Wow, neat!
This really reminds me of a weird little story by Harlan Ellison called “Laugh Track”, wherein a guy recongizes his aunt’s laughter coming out of canned laugh tracks on all kinds of bad TV sitcoms. She was taped as part of a studio audience years ago and her laugh keeps getting recycled, becoming more and more threadbare. Eventually the guy realized that a part of his aunt’s effervescent spirit is trapped in some kind of weird Hell where she is forced to laugh at unfunny recycled jokes. To free her, he sets himself on a quest that leads him to the Phantom Sweetener, a technician who works in the secret underbelly of network programming.
One wonders if poor Wilhelm (or whoever the original screamer was) is trapped in a purgatory of his own…
John S.
OT, but totally hysterical:
Obama Has to Win Every Contest – or Hillary Wins
Bwahahahahaha!
crack
OT- Yes.
Hysterical- not really.
And it’s being discussed all over the place why thread jack this?
SGEW
You know, it’s not even funny anymore. Sure, the first time the clowns fall down and hurt themselves, it’s funny. After watching them for an hour or so, as they writhe around in the ring, repeatedly hitting themselves on the heads with lead pipes and soiling their baggy pantaloons, not so much.
Oh, the humanity!
borehole
Crack, it’s because BJ commenters try to sneak a snippet of Clinton’s staff being obtuse dickheads into every possible thread. We call it “the Hillwhelm.”
mark
Oh, complaints are next door; it’s screaming lessons in here.
SGEW
But I came here for an argument!
Zuzu
Yep, seems to be a real indicator.
Did I mention I also knew about it?
Billy K
Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t know this by now. I guess I’m playing the “older than the internets” card, even though my “friends” tell me it makes me sound like a prick.
Neal
I have a lot of Ellison on the shelf. I’ve read “Laugh Track”. Great story. Harlan’s such a weird old coot.
John S.
Because there is no thread for it here – yet (cough,cough).
Bobzim
A friend of the family when I was a kid made good (one of the few West Virginians in the film industry not because they look “inbred or deformed”)and got a job at Skywalker Ranch as an accountant. While they were doing post-production sound for “Backdraft”, they realized that they needed a lady’s scream during the scene where Billy Baldwin “rescues” the mannequin. For some reason none of their canned screams would do, so they went office to office having employees scream for them and she won.
Now every time that movie is shown on cable, I get to tell that story to the amazement of nobody. Next time I’ll tell the story of my brother-in-law playing violin as an extra in “Blown Away”.
Ninerdave
I saw a report years back that traced a ricochet sound effect from I think it was the 50s all the way up to the 90s.
Think your stereotypical ricochet sound…and that’s it.
RSA
Thanks for the links, Tim F. Very cool. I wonder if there’s a single red-tailed hawk scream that’s appeared as often in scifi movies and westerns, or whether all of those sound alike?
Punchy
That link is “prohibited, catagorized as nudity”.
Thanks. For like the 18th time, a BJ link has taken me to what my IT guy calls prOn. I smell a pink slip.
Bobzim
After Ninerdave’s comment, I was going to link to one of the crappy band Ricochet’s videos but found this better one instead. Holy Shit!!
Funkula
I really wish I could unhear of the Wilhelm scream. It takes me right out of whatever I’m watching every time I hear it now.
jcricket
I know – john’s really late to the party of lame know-it-alls that bother to remember shit like this but can’t seem to remember important dates like their anniversary. Did I say that out loud?
John, it’s like your welcome to the Democratic party. Long overdue.
srv
Luckiest guy evah.
Billy K
Who?
ThymeZone
I know the Scream. I make it every time I open up a thread and find lukasiak and his blizzard of phony numbers.
Sirkowski
I used it too. About half-way through the clip.
Jake
That’s brilliant, it was even used in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
Come to think of it, the SWHS would be semi-tolerable if you replaced the entire script with WSs.
tBone
No shit, Tim. Turn in your geek card immediately. And stop having sex. It interferes with the trivia-gathering portion of the brain.
Bobzim
They didn’t show him cleaning the shit out of his pants, but you know it was there.
Cris
In this short piece on the Wilhelm scream, Joe Dante says he’s done with it, and apparently so is Ben Burtt.
AkaDad
That’s eerily similar to the scream that hookers make, when they see me naked.
Bob Smith
Dr. Davis telephone please, Dr. Davis, telephone please. Dr. Blair, Dr. Blair. Dr. Jay Hamilton, Dr. Jay Hamilton.
Birdzilla
The WILHELM SCREAM has been used in several movies not only from that aleins being eaten by the saloc in RETURN OF THE JEDI but from the storm troper that fell into the death star canyon when luke shot him