M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 39
Moviola … a sewing machine-like
device—steam-powered, maybe…
SL:
MM: …find the bowling pin sound,
line it up to the exact frame where
Fred falls down, make a mark with
a grease pencil, pull that out of the
Moviola, edit the head and the tail
of it, put a footage on it, hang it on
a trim bin—and then after doing
this hundreds of times throughout
the episode, those hundreds of
snippets of magnetic sound would
be spliced back into a reel of "fill
leader," and that is what would
go to the mix. As I remember, the
mix studio at Hanna-Barbera only
had six playback machines, so we
were limited to a maximum of four
tracks of sound effects. During my
tenure at Hanna-Barbera, making
cartoons was very factory-like. The
studio was producing five-and-a-
half hours of content every week.
This forced the editors to work as
efficiently as possible, requiring one
to know, maybe even memorize, the
library and rely on it, always leaning
on favorites and go-to sounds
that worked. There was very little
new recording ever done and the
library didn't really change much.
The most creative any of us got
was finding a sound effect we liked,
handing it off to sound transfer
where we would ask them to play
it backward, or speed it up. And
that was kind of "sound design" in
those days. Perhaps another level
of "sound design" would be layering
two or three sounds together to
create a new hybrid sound. That
was always exciting.
SL: And then you would archive
those for later use?
MM: Not very often. After four
years at Hanna-Barbera, I had
maybe a couple of new sounds
in the collection. My favorite
was a goofy vocalization I found
in another collection of sounds
that I named "Waheep." It was
onomatopoeic. When I arrived
at Hanna-Barbera in 1976, the
library was well established. All
those wonderful sounds of Dino
yapping, Fred running, getting hit
on the head with frying pans—all
had been recorded and mastered
for decades—dating back to the
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's early
days at MGM making Tom and Jerry
cartoons. Many of those sounds
were the genius of an unheralded
sound genius—Greg Watson. Greg
Watson was to Hanna-Barbera what
Treg Brown was to the Looney Tunes
shorts, and Jimmy Macdonald was
to the Disney animated shorts,
a clever and comic genius that
defined their sound for years. That
library was built leveraging many
traditional Vaudeville influences;
acoustic instruments recorded live
in an untoward way to come up with
funny noises.
SL: You've touched on it—that's
kind of where film sound comes
from. From the live performance
of sounds to match the actors
on stage. They would all have
their little kit of noisemakers—
Jimmy Macdonald came out of
percussion! So many of them did.
MM: Yup. It's fascinating to me, in
my research, it turns out that Walt
and Roy themselves would perform
live sound effects themselves with
the orchestra as they recorded to
picture!
SL: There's a story that they
poured all their money into the
first session for Steamboat Willie
and they had a big orchestra, but
for some reason, the sync wasn't
working! They recorded it—and
they were done—and then they
realized they couldn't sync it to
picture! So they had to do it again!
Walt sold his car, they performed a
bunch of the sounds themselves—
and they had, like, only five of the
orchestra members back to do
it again, in sync to picture. And
that's the track that you hear on
Steamboat Willie!
MM: I did not know that. That's the
early days when they couldn't afford
Steve Lee and Mark Mangini
MPSE (February 2012).
