Arrrgghhhh! We all know the Wilhelm Scream, the iconic piece of audio that has been featured in countless movies and TV shows over the decades, but Ben Burtt, the man credited with rediscovering it for the original Star Wars movie, told THR that he had “created a monster.“
The Wilhelm Scream can be traced back to Distant Drums, a 1951 Western starring Gary Cooper. It found its way into Warner Bros.’ stock sound library and was used in many other films, but it achieved fame when Burtt put it into Star Wars as part of an in-joke with his friends.
“It was a scream I first heard as a child. I recorded it off the television. It was in many of the Warner Bros. films in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a stock scream in their library, and it had been used in a lot of Westerns. For cowboys getting shot with arrows or whatever,” Burtt said. “It was just one of the many sounds I had.” While attending USC alongside fellow future sound editor Richard Anderson, the pair would insert the scream in their student films and laugh about it. During the production of Star Wars, Burtt was able to track down the original recording, and the game was on.
So in Star Wars, I stuck it in for a stormtrooper falling into a trench when he gets shot. It was just for my own pleasure. Nobody asked for it. Nobody noticed it. That was it. The next time might have been for More American Graffiti. I stuck it in. After that, I started seeing how far I could go with it. Richard Anderson had gone back to L.A. and he was working on other films, and he started putting it in his movies. We played this game of one-upmanship for 25 years, just the two of us knowing what we were doing.
Burtt continued: “He would put it in a Quentin Tarantino film and call me up and challenge me to find it. I put it in an Indiana Jones movie. It was a private joke. Nobody said a thing. It wasn’t until the Internet came along, it must have been around 2000 or so when people could collectively talk about trivia and DVDs were on hand so you could study these movies. Suddenly everybody was hearing the same scream on all these Lucas films, and on a few others, and began wondering what it was. Somehow the word got out. I didn’t mention it. But then it escaped onto the Internet and became, what do you call it, a meme? Is that what it is? I don’t know. Now it’s everywhere. I just heard it in a commercial on TV yesterday. An insurance commercial. It’s just crazy. I stopped putting it in. But even when I stopped, my crew would put it in because they felt it had to be there. I couldn’t stop them. I created a monster.“
What started as an in-joke to Burtt and his friends got out of control. “I never intended that,” Burtt said. “If you Google me, the first thing it says is: ‘Ben Burtt, creator of the Wilhelm Scream.’ I say to my wife: ‘Is that what I’m known for?’ It was a joke I made once and now I can never live it down.” Nowadays, Burtt says that including the Wilhelm Scream is a rite of passage for sound editors. “A kind of audio baptism,” he said. “You put it in and join the club. But none of it was intentional.“
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