Star Wars: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Chewbacca
4. His Voice Is A Combination Of Multiple Animal Cries
While the average person hasn't got the slightest idea what the sharpshooting and tech-savvy Wookiee is talking about the majority of the time, the various growls, roars, and howls that tumble out of Chewbacca's gob are actually more familiar than you realise.
Chewbacca's voice was the first thing world-class sound designer Ben Burtt was hired to work on when creating the first Star Wars. He'd then spend the next year recording a number of different animals that he'd use to create the iconic noises Wookiees would eventually make when communicating.
Bears, walruses, badgers, lions, and sick and domestic animals were all recorded by Burtt in that time, with the designer extracting different moans, grunts, and purring sounds that he felt had emotional feelings connected to them.
Burtt then ended up with a bunch of different categories of emotional sounds and began cutting those together "to get a sense of speech out of Chewie", while also trying to land on a sound that felt believable coming out of a mouth that didn't really have articulated lips.
So, after recording everything from bears to badgers and a great deal of trial and error, the Wookiee way of speaking was born.