Ben Burtt: Then there is Treg Brown, credited as the editor of the Warner Bros. cartoons from 1933 to 1966. He also created all the sound effects. He was a huge influence on me, because he used real sound effects for comic purposes and for exaggeration. The Road Runner is made from the sounds of high-speed aircraft. If Wile E. Coyote crashed into something, the impact wasn’t the sound of a cymbal crash or a bass drum hit; it was Treg Brown cutting in a thunderclap and a destroyer alert siren. Associating these real-world sounds with the events in the cartoon made the action seem all the more realistic and melodramatic. I found this same approach gave dramatic credibility to the fantasy film. For me, Star Wars was one gigantic Warner Bros. cartoon. [via editorsguild.com]

For example, Burtt created the sound of Wall-E’s “tank treads” by recording an old hand-cranked “coffee grinder” generator that he saw John Wayne use in a movie (unnamed, but Burtt was most likely referring to William Wellman’s 1953 drama of an Army plane missing in an Arctic wasteland, Island in the Sky). “That’s a great sounding motor, and I searched all around and finally found one on eBay for $40,” he said. “It came in its original wax packing, and we mounted it on a stand and used it to tailor-make the sounds of Wall-E’s treads. That was a soft sound and could fit his slower movements.” Burtt added that Wall-E’s more high-speed movements were obtained by recording an inertia starter from an old JN-5 Jenny biplane, a sound many in the audience recognized as the source also of the Tasmanian Devil, Bugs Bunny’s nemesis in several Warner Bros. cartoons.

[via editorsguild.com]