I'm talking about the sound of the computer or force field control room in "Whom Gods Destroy"..... I heard this same background in a cartoon years ago. Any ideas which cartoon this was?
which cartoon had "Whom Gods Destroy" computer background?
- Thread starter billsantos
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The same sound effect was probably used in a lot of different shows that employed the same sound-editing company. IIRC, Star Trek's sound effects were done by Glen Glenn Sound, one of the primary sound-editing and SFX vendors in the TV industry in the '60s and '70s. But Horta-Mahana, the company that did sound effects for Filmation's shows, acquired a lot of the Glen Glenn SFX library for use in Trek: TAS, and then went on to use those sound effects in other shows. So you may be thinking of some Filmation cartoon, but it's probably not limited to a specific one.
Filmation even used those sounds in their live action shows, like Space Academy and its sequel, Jason of Star Command. Probably Ark II as well, but I never watched that show so don't know.
^I'm sure Ark II used many of the same sound effects, i.e. the Horta-Mahana library. Back then, sound-effects libraries would've been on vinyl discs or magnetic tape, so they would've been much smaller than the huge digital sound libraries filmmakers can draw on today. That's why sound effects in older shows were so repetitive -- every dog bark was the same bark, every thunderclap or explosion sounded exactly the same, etc.
That's not exactly the same sound effect; the WotW sound is a bit softer and not as resonant, with fewer higher-pitched overtones. It's either a different sound created the same way (by striking a high-tension metal cable, a technique also used by Ben Burtt to create the Star Wars blaster sound) or the same sound processed differently to sound more muffled, although I think it's the former.
The sound that was reused from WotW to ST was the warbling sound of the war machines' levitation beams, which was sped up to become the phaser sound effect. And the heat ray sound effect may have shown up in TAS; I know it was used on various Filmation shows in the '70s.
I think that show drew on music from a generic stock library, as many '50s shows did.
^It could well be a different take from the same session, I suppose, but it's definitely not the exact same sound.
I'll have to watch WotW again. To me the phaser sound is more of a hiss than a warble, so I can't connect the two.
There are some TOS episodes where the phaser sound is slower/deeper and sounds more like the WotW effect -- e.g. the laser cannon in "The Cage" or the phasers in "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
I believe the original sound was a recording of a swarm of locusts chirping. There are various different pitches/speeds of the sound in use in different Trek episodes and other productions over the years, but they all come from the same source.
I recently learned that many of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects were released at stockmusic.com. I auditioned a bunch yesterday with search terms such as "sci-fi", "space" and other terms along with "Hanna-Barbera" and came across several laser sounds that later appeared in Trek along with photon torpedo sounds. There was also a variant of the "Atavacron". Unfortunately, this is about all I could come up with and my understanding is that many of the effects are with other firms, etc and have never been released. I don't think Glen Glenn has released theirs, for example.
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