Pat Foley: Some of these old effects, they try to redo them, you know, to figure out how they were originally done. JB: There were rows of 35mm sound effect tracks all staring at you with every kind of sound you could imagine written on them, and they would say things like “loud rattling” and “soft rattling” “eerie sounds, not too scary.” Greg Watson: When Bill and Joe left MGM, the company gave them the privilege of taking a long a nucleus of sound library.īH: This was all done on 35mm soundtrack. You don’t have to go in and bang things around anymore. (Laugh) He was a dedicated sound effect guy, and he’d handle a multiple assortment of sounds that way.īH: Once your library is built up to a proper size, you can get any effect you need right from your library. And I think he was taking all that lumber home later on for himself. JB: McAlpin was a builder of all kinds of equipment. He did our sound effects for all of the Tom & Jerrys. All of hat stuff was there, and McAlpin would always be over there banging stuff and creating sound effects. They had all kinds of things: dishpans, guns, pop things, whistles, slide whistles. He did a lot o that building.īH: All of that was done on a stage where we would record that effect. I mean he’d have a doll rod bent back, attached to a piece of metal which would hit something else and make a clang or a wack. JB: McAlpin used to build all kinds of equipment at MGM. When McAlpin was taken from Harman-Ising to MGM, I’m assuming he took the entire Harman-Ising library with him. Fred McAlpin…a true pioneer…worked at Harman-Ising at the time. I started working at Harman and Ising Studios in 1930. When Huckleberry Hound won an Emmy the very first year, it showed that it wasn’t the amount of drawings, it was the material that was carrying it.īill Hanna: Our sound effects library I know goes back to the early days for MGM, which was 1937. And we were the ones that started it in the studio on LaBrea. Because it’s a hand business, and the more drawings you have, the more expensive the product is. The one thing it had less of was drawings. We used the best sound effects people…it had good visual artwork and painting, funny characters, good stories. Basically the material we were dong had good sound effects. NBC picked up the very first one, which was called “Ruff & Ready.” And then I went to Chicago and sold the Huckleberry Hound show. JB: In cutting back, we had to use every trick to put over the feeling of motion and animation, like using camera shakes, truck-ins, dissolves, quick cuts. How do we put in all the gags and stuff with, let’s say, 8,000 drawings instead of 26,000 drawings? You have to draw of every piece of knowledge and ingenuity that you ever could think of relating to animation. And eventually we made a quick deal with Screen Gems for five minutes for $3,000. To give you an idea, at MGM, we were averaging $45,000 for five minutes. So now what happens is, you go around to the various possible sources and are turned down by everyone because they said nobody could afford to do animation for television. Then suddenly, because of the company’s problem…not our, because we were rolling very well…they closed the MGM animation studio. And you studied them and reworked them, and honed it down as good as you could. I mean, you did a pencil test on every single scene. And they won seven Oscars, and you would rally finesse them. See, the idea was, you would do an animation that was Tom & Jerry for twenty years. Joe Barbera: We realized early on that sound effects were just as important in limited animations they were in full animation. The interviews with William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, Greg Watson and Pat Foley were conducted on April 2, 1993. We put together this imaginary roundtable discussion by combining separate interviews with four of the driving forces behind this library of cartoon sound effects. The Hanna-Barbera sound effects are legendary and so are the men behind them. This sound effects box was one of my favorite projects from my time at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. Click here for my full Hanna-Barbera index.
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