Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1490686
We had been there several hours, and we were getting a little burnt out. Starting to get punchy. So I offered to take P on a Toys R Us run. We went there a lot, which we rationalized by needing to buy Foley props and such occasionally. Okay, okay ... It was an excuse to buy toys. We had started loading up a shopping cart together with a bunch of silliness to take back to the shop with us, but had split up in the store to each look on our own. I was looking at something when all of a sudden, I heard John P's voice screaming, "SLEEEEEE!!!" Mind you, John P rarely screamed… So I moved quickly. I found him about an aisle away with his hand over his mouth staring in amazement at something on a shelf. "What…?" I said as I approached. "LOOK!" he said as he pointed at the shelf. And on the shelf was a plastic head of a cobra. I looked at it closer and saw the Aladdin movie logo … and I realized it was a toy version of Jafar's snake staff from the film. "What is that doing on the shelf this early...?!?" I said. And then I noticed something else on the package. It said, "...With Authentic Movie Sound!" "I haven't even made anything for that thing yet! Did you give them anything from the library?" John P asked me. "No! Nothing for that!" I took it off the shelf and pushed the button. It made a horrible low- fidelity plastic-speaker *HISSSS!* And then suddenly, the light bulb went off in both of our heads. John P and I looked at each other, smiling hugely. "Oh … we HAVE to do it," I said. "Definitely," P said as he tossed it in our shopping cart. So we took it to the studio, recorded it, and put it in the movie. It's buried somewhere in the final scene… I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly where it was. But it's in there. Somewhere there was a toy designer watching the film and saying, "HEY! I got it right!" Our supervising sound editor Mark Mangini was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Aladdin. But the Oscar that year went to David Stone and Tom McCarthy for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Ironically, David had previously supervised the sound effects with Mark on Beauty and the Beast ... but that's another story in the book. Look for Steve's book, Adventures in Sound: My Life in Hollywood as a Sound Effects Wrangler, coming soon … and join The Hollywood Sound Museum on Patreon for more stories about creating audio for entertainment media: Patreon .com/HollywoodSoundMuseum Keep listening. Mark Mangini Steve Lee, sound effects wrangler. Photo courtesy of The Hollywood Sound Museum