I hope I don’t have to explain what the Wilhelm Scream is, but if I do, here you go. There is a 1951 Gary Cooper movie called Distant Drums. I can’t say I’ve see it, I’m not a huge Western fan, but someone who did was Ben Burtt.
Burtt is a sound designer, best known for creating icon sounds such as the light sabres or R2-D2. When he was a young lad, he loved to record things and recorded the scream from the TV. He explains:
“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. It was just one of the many sounds I had.”
Burtt went on to attend USC and met another sound editor, Richard Anderson. While making student movies, they would include the Wilhelm Scream and giggle to themselves.
Put it in for a laugh
Burtt ended up on a small production called Star Wars. He was able to track down the original recording and insert into the movie. He carries 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.”
“He (Anderson) 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.“
Monster is a strong word, it’s just one of those hidden Easter Eggs that nerds love. I know, when I hear it, I giggle to myself.
So Ben Burtt is the man originally credited with making the Wilhelm Scream famous. So next time you hear it, point it out to whomever you’re with, a loved one, a paid companion or everyone else in the cinema. #themoreyouknow