Star Wars: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Imperial TIE Fighter

10. The Ju 87 Stuka & Elephants Combine For Its Iconic Bellow

As a symbol of the Empire's might and the film’s bad-guy craft the TIE Fighter needed to sound suitably menacing, and when it comes to menacing you need look no further than the Stuka’s infamous “Jericho Trumpet.”

As Joe Johnston, working on storyboards at the time, recalls:

“In World War 2, the super dive-bombers had an artificially created siren wail created by air ducts. They didn’t serve any purpose except to create this noise, which would terrify people. It was intended that the TIE should achieve the same effect.”

Sound designer Ben Burtt found its analogue in an animal not normally known for being frightening – the African Elephant.

Burtt was a fan of the early Fox Studios films’ sound design and among them was The Roots Of Heaven, a story about a team trying to save elephants from extinction. Burtt sampled the film’s elephant screeches and slowed them down, producing the TIE Fighter’s signature sound. The slight hiss you hear came from a more mundane source – the sound of tyres moving through water.

Burtt did not think the sound would be used but the Star Wars brains trust loved it and the rest, as they say, is history.