>Just thought of this on the spur of the moment. What's your favorite
>sound effect?

Oh. So many choices. There's the transformation sound effect from the original Transformers cartoon, the scene transition card sound effect from Challenge of the Super Friends, the concussion rifle sound from Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight... pretty much all of the sound design from the Star Wars movies themselves... the Wilhelm... the repulsor sound effects in the new Iron Man film, which are so much better than what I went with when I wrote The Iron Age issue #1 (I think I had in mind something like the Star Wars blaster sound effect, a fine sound, but not nearly as "right" for repulsors as what Christopher Boyes came up with for Iron Man)... the Universal Studios standard telephone ring, which I have as the ringtone on my cellphone, much to the confusion of young people...

(True story, by the way. The other day I met up with Zoner at a movie theater about an hour from my house for Iron Man, and he got there a little sooner than I did, so he phoned me to see how far away I was. The answer was "about 20 feet", since I was just outside the theater's front door at the time. There was a small clutch of teenagers practicing skateboard tricks on the sidewalk outside, and when my phone rang, they were transfixed by the anachronistic sound, their tiny teenage brains unable to work out where the old-fashioned telephone could be. One of them even said to another, "That's, like, an old dial phone! Where's it coming from?!")

Overall, though, I think I'm gonna have to go with the Martian heat ray from the 1953 George Pál War of the Worlds. Though frankly all the Martian sound effects from the 1953 War of the Worlds own, and all have appeared again in one form or another (most famously the sound effect accompanying the green "wingtip" blasters, also heard in the above clip, which was recycled into the photon torpedo launch sound in the original Star Trek, another all-time favorite).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/