A (6:35)
Over the next 20 years, the scream was used in many films produced by Warner Bros. Such as A Star Is Born, the Command Them, the Land of the Pharaohs, Helen of Troy, Sergeant Rutledge, PT109, the Green Berets, and the Wild Bunch. In the early 1970s, a group of film students at the University of Southern California noticed that this scream was appearing in a lot of different films. It became a running joke amongst the film students and they dubbed it the Wilhelm Scream, based on its appearance in the 1953 film the Charge at Feather River. In it, a minor character named Private Wilhelm screams after taking an arrow to the leg, and he used to be an adventurer like you before he took an arrow to the knee. The scream would have probably remained an inside joke, except that one of the students, Ben Burtt, landed a position as the sound designer on a small science fiction film titled Star Wars. While combing studio archives for Star wars in the mid-1970s, Burt found the old scream and dropped it into a moment where a stormtrooper falls from a ledge. He liked the throwback nature of it and the private joke of using the same recognizable scream that his buddies back in film school had made fun of. This began a tradition of him using it in all the subsequent movies that he worked on as his own personal calling card, many of which were very high profile films. The list included the Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, all the Indiana Jones movies, Willow, Gremlins, Anchorman, Die Hard, With a vengeance, Lethal Weapon 4, and the fifth Element. Ben Burtt became one of the most accomplished film sound effect editors in Hollywood. And many others in the field began to study his films. And they noticed the exact same thing that Burt and his film school contemporaries noticed back in the early 1970s. The scream seemed to be everywhere. As other sound designers and filmmakers learned about Burt's running gag, they began incorporating the Wilhelm Scream into their own films as well. It evolved from a personal Easter egg into an industry wide inside joke. Directors like Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen brothers began using began appearing in even more movies including Toy Story, Reservoir Dogs, the Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and many, many, many more films. With the rise of the Internet and film fan culture, the Wilhelm Scream transitioned from an insider's joke to public knowledge. Movie enthusiasts began actively listening for it. Websites cataloged its appearances, and it became a pop culture phenomenon in its own right. By the 2000s, the Wilhelm scream was widely recognized in film culture. The National Science and Media Museum in the United Kingdom noted its use in more than 400 different films. @ this point, the sound had crossed into television, animation, and video games, which made the gag even more familiar to general audiences. Eventually, the Scream became so well known that it began to distract from the films. In 2018, Lucasfilm supervising sound editor Matthew Wood said that Star wars would stop using the Wilhelm Scream. The Last Jedi quietly omitted it, and the series moved to a different signature scream, a way of signaling that the soundscape was evolving. The choice didn't end the use of the Scream elsewhere, but it did pause the very tradition in Star wars that had popularized it. In the process of researching this episode, I came across several mentions of the sound editors of the recent Star wars films who claimed that they had created a new scream that they've started using. Supposedly, the voice behind the scream was none other than George Lucas himself, and it was supposedly recorded for the 1973 film American Graffiti. They dubbed the new scream the George. However, despite a great deal of searching on my part, I was unable to find anyone who had identified the scream or who had come forward with what it sounds like. So I'm just throwing this out there. If anyone listening can find out what the George Scream is, you would be greatly advancing the cause of scream science. There is yet another twist to the story. In 2023, preservation work at the USC School of Cinematic Arts surfaced the complete original recording session of the Wilhelm Scream in high quality form. CalArts Sound Professor Craig Smith had been transferring and restoring the Sunset Editorial Sound Effects Library, a trove of 35mm magnetic film elements donated to the USC School of cinematic arts in 1990. He described how student engineers transferred those elements to quarter inch tape in 1990, how the tapes later developed sticky shed syndrome, and how he stabilized them by baking and then digitized and restored the tracks. Among the reels was the complete original session for the now famous Scream that was recorded for distant drums in 1951. Smith decided the best way to keep these effects from disappearing was to make them broadly accessible. Smith uploaded the Wilhelm session to the freesound.org website in February of 2023 with a Creative Commons Zero Public Domain License which explicitly allows free reuse even in commercial work. The item's notes identify it as the original man eaten by Alligator take. If you're curious, and because it's in the public domain, here is the full recording of the scream takes from 1951. It's only 30 seconds and the history is made in Scream 4, a man.
