1. Lightsaber - Movie Projector Parts And Television Interference.
The Sound Effect: Lightsabers are a quintessentially Star Wars, over time becoming a bigger and bigger part of the movies. The weapon of a Jedi Knight, the essentially renamed laser swords have become so iconic they make anything similar feel derivative. Being scientifically impossible, their construction for the big screen was a hard task. Initially planned to be brought to life using quickly-rotating mirrors on-set, the difficulty of the process led to the use of rotoscoping; a method of superimposing animation on live-action, frame-by-frame. Of course, the sound is as big a part of the sabers as the look. A constant hum that accelerates with the sword's movement, giving way to a loud crackling when two come into contact. The Strange Origin: Suitable for something so futuristic, the lightsaber was one of the more technical sounds. The general hum was a mixture of interlock motors (a mechanism that allowed one reel of film to play through multiple projectors at once in larger cinemas) and the sound distortion from recording close to a television. To create the movement (or vvvwing as Professor Frink calls it), this sound was played and then recorded again, this time by a moving microphone. That is how you vvvwing. What other iconic sound effects, Star Wars or otherwise, have crazy origins? Let us know in the comments.
