48 M PS E . O R G
co-supervisor on the show) were
good about incorporating some
of those sounds, so there's a little
bit of that same "Disney magic"
in there that they created. In fact,
the very first sound in Beauty and
the Beast I like to point out are the
Disney birds that Jimmy performed
for Cinderella.
MM: Yeah. That was a very
conscious move to harken back to
the old movies, to start with that
saccharine bird twitter.
SL: Well, it's perfect! The
backgrounds were real birds. John
P. (sound designer John Pospisil)
had made some really great
"fairytale forest" backgrounds, and
I had suggested to him… I liked
to record aviaries with birds from
all over the world, so it'll give the
ornithologists a headache when
they try to figure out where the
birds are from…!
MM: I never heard that!
SL: Oh yeah.
MM: It's interesting you bring that
up. I was a fan of Jimmy Macdonald.
And I felt like my success—sort
of tying together the first part of
our conversation, about seeing
Star Wars, wanting to do work like
Ben Burtt, and wanting to make
a difference in film sound—I had
decided I wanted to be the next
Jimmy Macdonald or Treg Brown or
Greg Watson. It was being able to
work on Beauty and the Beast where
I saw the possibility of that coming
true. I wanted to honor Jimmy's
legacy with his sounds, but I owed it
to myself to try and brand it with my
approach, my Jimmy Macdonald-
like approach—which was simply
record new fresh stuff, make props
like he did, etc. ... but let's have this
be as bespoke as possible while
honoring Jimmy's legacy and having
it feel like a Disney movie.
SL: Well, you certainly did that on
Aladdin. All the stuff that you and
John P. made. Especially for the
Genie's first appearance. I don't
think that there's a single "stock"
Disney effect. It's all original, but
all completely in that same vein. It
felt like it could have almost been a
Jimmy Macdonald film.
MM: Yeah. John P. would end up
making most of those. I made
about—I don't know—about 10 or
12 of 'em, and John P. made about
25 of 'em! But the thing I remember
most was sitting with John P. and
watching that sequence in the cave
over and over again. He comes
out as Arnold Schwarzenegger, as
Ed Sullivan … and he's constantly
morphing into objects … and John
P. and I are discussing, what makes
this funny? What sound either plays
to what you're seeing, or against
what you're seeing? He comes out
as a game show host. So you have
to hear the silly buzzer, and the
whizzer sound that'd you'd hear
if you won a prize. We were using
metaphorical thinking a lot—trying
to understand what complements
what we're seeing, versus the
cartoon aesthetic of just layering
in funny sounds. Cartoony sounds.
I didn't want to be "cartoony." In
Mark creating the sound for
the thumper that was used to
summon a sandworm in
Dune:
Part One
(2021). Supervising
sound editors Mark Mangini
and Theo Green took home the
Golden Reel Award, BAFTA, and
Oscar for
Dune in 2022.
Photo by Peter Fisher
