Not too long ago, I downloaded an app called Ham Horn because I wanted to get an airhorn sound for my cellphone.
Go ahead, call me mean, low or rude, but I am a father who is desperate to find a way to get his ADD son up in the morning and I figured combining the airhorn with a bluetooth speaker would do it. I had been using the speaker to play “You Can’t Stop The Beat” at full tilt, but, unfortunately, he started to like it and just stayed in bed dancing.
While I was planning with the app one morning I discovered there were other sound effects like a guy yelling, “HAM!” which is hilarious to play in a kosher household.
It also had movie ship sound (which didn’t sound like a ship or anything else I’d ever heard anywhere), Sad Trombone (which is exactly what you’d think it is) and The Wilhelm.
I knew what it was even before I played it.
For the uninitiated, The Wilhelm is the sound of a man screaming that has been used in movies since 1951 whenever a person is shot, pushed from a tall building, dragged into the water by an alligator has an especially painful orgasm or what have you.
It got me to thinking about The Wilhelm and canned sounds in general, especially canned laughter.
No, it doesn’t come in a can. It’s just pre-recorded and doesn’t have that so fresh feeling.
But here’s the thing. The Wilhelm was recorded in 1951 and so were many of the audience laugh tracks that you hear on television shows today, which means Wilhelm and some of the people who are laughing at your favorite sit-com have been dead for years.
And it made me wonder what they were thinking at the time of the recording and the years after.
Wilhelm, especially.
I mean, why is he screaming.
Had he closed his fingers in a door?
Was a snake crawling up his leg?
Was he mourning Germany’s loss in the war?
What? Too soon? It’s not as if his name were Johnny or James.
Also, I wondered what he was thinking as he recorded it and heard it in later years.
“Well, I’m glad that part of the shoot is over”?
“That’s great. Im going to get an extra couple of bucks for doing the voiceover work” or maybe even “Thank god that’s done. If I never hear that recording again, it will be too soon.”
And, if its the last one, did he put his fingers in his ears when he watched movies that involved screaming knowing what was coming or did he feel the same way that “The Agony of Defeat” skier felt each week when ABC started “The Wide World of Sports” with the phrase “From the thrill of victory” and showed a runner crossing the finish line “To The Agony of Defeat” showing the same skier wiping out on the slopes.
“Look, Lars, it’s you again,” his friends would say and he would just bury his head in his hands and cry.
Was he ever scared? Did he have to go all method actor and try to remember a time when he was so scared? Or at that point, was he so bored with it, he decided to slap one last one together just to finish it and get the job done so he could move on with his life and forget about it?
Did he say, “Well, there’s one they’ll never use” as he made a sound he considered so fake that he was embarrassed to have had it come out of his mouth?
You know, the one that got away?
Who knows?
It’s just good to know that the next time you’re watching a horror movie and the yell scares you half to death that the person who’s yelling isn’t as afraid of dying as you are…because he’s already dead.