Snap-hiss

Last week I posted a YouTube thingy collating the ten best sound effects of Star Wars, and I indicated that I thought one sound was horribly missing while one made no sense to be included at all. Here it is again:



The one that I don't think belongs there at all is the Techno Union guy. I think he's a neat touch, but he's a throwaway gag, really. What's missing? The Millennium Falcon, obviously. That ship has a totally distinctive sound to its engines, such that in the movies you can always tell when the Falcon is onscreen or approaching. The best example of this comes during the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi, when there's a tracking shot that follows some Rebel fighters as they pursue a group of TIE fighters. All of a sudden, you hear the Falcon's engines offscreen and the ship then roars into the frame from above, as if overflying the audience.

Other ships have different sounds as well: Slave One's engines have a roar of their own, and I love the "lumbering bomber" drone of the Naboo cruiser that lands on Coruscant at the beginning of Attack of the Clones.

Other great sounds in Star Wars? The pod-racers in The Phantom Menace are terrific; many of them have distinctive sounds, especially Sebulba's racer with that pounding pulse it makes. The blasters held by the destroyer droids have their own sound, apart from most of the other blasters in the series; Han Solo's blaster also has its own sound. The various astrodroids throughout the films also all have their own sounds, although all are roughly similar to R2-D2's familiar beeps. And if you really listen carefully, you can tell that the lightsabers don't all sound the same either. Luke's green lightsaber from RotJ has a different ignition sound than his earlier, blue saber; Count Dooku's saber also has its own ignition sound.

That's what makes the sounds of Star Wars so great: objects of similar types make similar sounds, but none of them ever really make the same sound. This is the type of thing that mechanics know; two cars of the same make, model and year will nevertheless sound slightly different at idle. (George Lucas probably knows this, as he's an old car hound.) Everything in Star Wars always sounds like a real thing with real moving parts. I love that.