This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

Mark Mangini is one of the most prolific sound designers of all time. He’s been credited on over 150 films, including Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Aladdin, Space Jam, The Green Mile, Anchorman, Mad Max: Fury Road, Dune, and tons more. In this episode, Mark joins us to count down six of our favorite sonic moments from his career, and reveals the secrets behind how these iconic sounds were made. This episode was made in partnership with Pro Sound Effects.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

misterchristianwhiteman by Ben Noble
Sven Lindvall by Winter Fresh
Gentle Chase by Sound of Picture
Marten Moses by Lenses
Clouds by Josh Hoover
Remember Your Past by Golden Age Radio
Lillywhite by Sound of Picture
The Industry by Skyra
When She Dances by Ritchie Everett
My New Disease by Under Earth
Quesa by This Once

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View Transcript ▶︎

[clip: Dune 2021 sandworm scene]

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

This is a scene from Dune that takes place in the open desert. In it, the emperor’s soldiers have just attacked a character named Kynes. As they go to finish her off, Kynes starts pounding her fist on the ground. The soldier raises his blade. But suddenly, the sand underneath them falls away as a giant, monstrous worm opens its mouth and swallows them all.

Mark Mangini: And I couldn't find a sound effect for it. And as is often the case, the easiest way to do it is to do it yourself.

That’s sound designer Mark Mangini explaining the moment to a fellow sound designer.

Mark Mangini: So I took a little lavalier mic, maybe like the one I have on. And I dropped the lavalier mic down in my mouth, and I just, I did this, I went [gurgles].

From there, all it took was a little processing to get to this.

[clip: final sandworm vocalization]

[music in]

Creative decisions like these have made Mark one of the most successful sound designers ever. He started his career working at Hanna Barbera on classic cartoons like Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones.

[cartoon SFX]

Since then, he's been credited on over a hundred and fifty movies including Indiana Jones, Aladdin, Space Jam, Anchorman, Blade Runner 2049, Dune, and tons more.

To date, he's won two Oscars and has been nominated a total of six times. He's worked with superstar directors like Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, and JJ Abrams. In other words, he's an absolute sound design legend.

But as amazing as he is as a sound designer, what Mark really is, is a storyteller. So we picked six of our favorite unforgettable moments from Mark's career to learn the stories behind how they were made.

Let's get into it.

[music out]

[clip: Gremlins trailer]

Here's movie number one. See if you can guess it.

Gremlins Trailer: And most important, no matter how much they beg, never, never let them eat after midnight.

For anyone who's never seen Gremlins, you're missing out on a stone cold classic.

Gremlins Trailer: Gremlins. They'll be expecting you.

[music in]

Gremlins is a quintessential eighties movie that's all about these adorable creatures called mogwais.

[clip: Gizmo’s song]

But there's a catch. If you get water on 'em, they multiply. And if you feed them after midnight, they turn into evil gremlins.

[sfx: Gremlin vocalization]

The lead mogwai is named Gizmo.

[clip: Gizmo sounds]

Gizmo's voice was created by Howie Mandel. You might remember him as the host of...

Howie Mandel: Deal or no deal.

But he was also the voice of Bobby in the 90s kids cartoon Bobby's world.

Bobby's World: Is it me, or is everyone picking on me?

Which is pretty similar to his voice for Gizmo.

[clip: Gizmo]

[music out]

But the evil gremlin sounds were crafted by Mark Mangini, alongside voice artist Mark Dodson.

[music in]

Mark Mangini: Mark, up until that point, was known for being the voice of Salacious Crumb.

That's Jabba the Hutt's pet creature in Return of the Jedi.

[clip: Salacious Crumb]

Mark Mangini: So, I brought him in for an audition and Mark ended up having this maniacal laugh that I used everywhere. In fact, it is his laugh from the audition tape that is the signature laugh that you hear when there's a gremlin up on a signal light and he switches it from green to red and the truck crashes and you hear this “hahaha.”

[clip: laughter scene from Gremlins]

Once he had these vocalizations recorded, he combined them with animal sounds.

Mark Mangini: I recorded a couple of really bizarre sounding pit bulls. And they make this guttural, growling sound.

[clip: dog growls]

Mark Mangini: I would send those sounds to Mark. So that it always felt like a seamless blend, not like, "Oh, that was an animal,” and, “Oh, there's a human voice."

[clip: gremlin growl]

Mark Mangini: We could have gone all animal, but I felt as though if we could make the gremlins recognizable enough that a child would wanna try to make a gremlin cackle, that would be a big success.

[clip: gremlin growl]

[music out]

Sound number two comes from a movie that's so 90s it hurts. I'll give you a sec to see if you can guess it.

[clip: Chris Tucker in Fifth Element]

Ruby Rhod: And he’s got something to say to those fifty billion pair of ears out there. Pop it, D Man!

Corben: Um, hi.

Ruby Rhod: Unbelievable!

The Fifth Element has tons of great sound design, from the whoosh of Bruce Willis taxi...

[clip: Taxi swoosh]

…To the crackling ball of fire hurtling towards Earth.

[clip: fireball]

And then there's the ZF-1 gun, which is an insanely complicated sci-fi weapon that looks like a cross between a Nerf Blaster and a robotic armadillo. It's used by the bad guy named Zorg. He's an evil scientist played by Gary Oldman with a rad 90s haircut.

[clip: ZF-1 scene]

Zorg: Your time for revenge is at hand. Voila, the ZF-1.

[clip: electronic gun sounds + ZF-1 firing]

[music in]

Mark Mangini: We had two goals in mind in creating the sound for it. One was that it should sound like a precision machine. So all the moving parts should sound precise and motorized and metallic because it's a plastic prop.

The ZF-1 has a bunch of different functions. Here's Zorg explaining it to some gnarly looking aliens.

[music out into clip: ZF-1 scene]

Zorg: Rocket Launcher. My famous net launcher. The always efficient flame thrower. And for the grand finale, the all new ice cube system.**

But Mark's favorite ZF-1 sound was a bit more traditional.

Mark Mangini: It was the sort of machine gun effect that I wanted to make sound the most threatening, and the solution was simply not just to make a rapid fire sound like you'd get from an M-16 or something like that.

[sfx: m16]

Mark Mangini: But to make it sound like it had some kind of assistive mechanism, like a motor. So we added a traditional kitchen blender (imitates blender)

[sfx: blender]

Mark Mangini: …to give it this high frequency whine that made it more powerful and made it feel like it was feeding bullets in an extraordinarily rapid fashion.

[clip: ZF-1]

Mark Mangini: There was something about that high frequency cutting sound that made it feel more dangerous.

[clip: gun fires again]

Sound number three comes from a sequel to a classic sci-fi movie. It’s also one of the two movies Mark has won an Oscar for.

[clip: Blade Runner 2049 trailer]

Blade Runner: Officer KD6-3.7, let's begin. Ready? Yes, sir. Reset your baseline. In blood black, nothingness began to spin.

In Blade Runner 2049, there's one scene where Ryan Gosling walks through the dystopian ruins of Las Vegas.

[clip: Bladerunner 2049]

The sky is orange, and he's totally alone, surrounded by broken statues and abandoned buildings. Meanwhile, all we can hear are thousands and thousands of bees.

Mark Mangini: The scene is built entirely from brand new recordings that we had made. I wanted you to feel creeped out by being that close to that kind of sound because many people are instinctually frightened by bees. And this can be a real trigger sound for some. So I wanted it to be the most expressive version of bees you'd ever heard before.

Mark Mangini: So we had microphones inside the hive to get those closeup sounds of the bees even landing on the microphones.

[sfx: bee lands on microphone]

Mark Mangini: And then at the other end of the spectrum, we put an eight channel surround sound microphone outside of the beehive. And you would occasionally get a bee flying right by one of the microphones.

[sfx: bee goes by mic]

Mark Mangini: And you would get these beautiful zzz [sfx: bee doppler shift] you'd get this incredible doppler shift at close range. And we took those little bits and flew them around the room and flew them around the audience and put them in the overheads. And you got something really experiential.

[music in]

As for why the movie makers chose bees for that scene, Mark believes it ties into the theme of natural vs. artificial life.

Mark Mangini: It poses the question to the audience, "What constitutes human life?” Because our story revolves around a character who we're not even sure if he is a replicant.

Deepfake A replicant is a bio-engineered robot that looks and acts exactly like a human.

Mark Mangini: It stops for a moment and allows you as the audience to think about, “Is he a replicant? And what is the difference between a bee, an organic creature, and him?” I think those are lovely rhetorical questions to ask.

We've already covered three incredible movies, but we're only halfway through. Some of Mark's wildest stories came from a famous sci fi franchise, another Oscar winning sequel, and a Disney classic.

Mark Mangini: You could feel and taste and hear the spit and the gnashing of the teeth.

That's coming up after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

Mark Mangini is one of the most prolific sound designers out there. And we're counting down six of our favorite sonic moments from his career.

[music out]

Sound number four comes from an animated movie that was partly inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet.

[clip: Lion King trailer]

Lion King: He was born to rule. “This'll all be mine?” “Everything the light touches.” “Wow!” But a shadow lies over the kingdom. “I will be king! Run away and never return.”

When Mark got the job on The Lion King, he knew exactly which animal recordings to turn to.

Mark Mangini: The Lion King roars are from the series of recordings I made of lions and tigers and pumas and other big cats for the Stephen Spielberg, Tobe Hooper film Poltergeist.

In Poltergeist, there's a ghost called the Closet Beast that makes freaky roaring sounds.

[clip: Poltergeist]

Mark Mangini: Since it looked kind of feline to me in the first place, I went out and began recording wild animals, and I had a unique opportunity to get within inches of the animals almost like you could feel and taste and hear the spit and the gnashing of the teeth.

[clip: animal recordings]

For The Lion King, Mark decided to reuse these recordings because they felt so intimate. But the sound team also mixed in noises that were performed by voice actor Frank Welker. Here’s Frank in a sound booth, recording lion sounds for the movie.

[clip: Frank Welker]

And here’s a clip from the film, where Mufasa fights the hyenas.

[clip: The Lion King]

And that's the end of the story… Except, it's not, because there’s another place where you’ve definitely heard Mark’s recordings of big cats. For that, we need to insert a rewind sound effect and head back to the 1920s.

[sfx: rewind]

[music in]

At the time, MGM was one of the biggest movie studios around. And famously, they had a sonic logo that featured a roaring lion. Here's the first one with sound, from 1928. This roar was made by a lion named Jackie.

[clip: Jackie]

Six years later, in 1934, Jackie was replaced by another lion named Tanner.

[clip: Tanner]

Over the next fifty years, the lion that you see on screen was swapped out a few times. But they kept using Tanner's Roar.

*[clip: second part of Tanner’s roar]

[music out]

But that's not the version we hear today, because in the early 1980s...

[music in]

Mark Mangini: After I had finished those recordings and completed the Closet Beast for Poltergeist, we were heading towards final mix and MGM sent us the old recording.

[clip: old MGM logo]

Mark Mangini: And I thought, "We are high fidelity, and we're starting our movie with the rattiest sound in the universe." And, you know, a little light bulb went off, ding.

[sfx: ding]

Mark Mangini: "Hey, I have lions!" (laughs) And I was quite nervous about this. I thought, "Is this sacrilege, replacing the logo with new sound and not going with tradition?"

So, Mark started working on a high fidelity version of the MGM Lion Roar. But he soon made a discovery.

Mark Mangini: Though you see the lion mouth open wide, once I learned what that sound really is, it sounds more like a yawn than it does the king of the jungle. It's more like a “Wooooo” [sfx: lion roar] not a “Rawwwr!” [sfx: tiger roar] like that.

Mark Mangini: And I thought “Something's wrong here.” (laughs) So as I went through my recordings, I just kept falling back on the tiger recordings, which had so much more venom in them.

[sfx: snarls and growls]

Mark Mangini: When Steven Spielberg came into hear playback, I had to do a disclaimer quickly. "You know, Steven, this is I know we're not supposed to MGM a hundred years of history, but our movie is high fidelity." And he heard it and he loved it and so did MGM and I would end up mastering it and giving it to MGM.

Here's that updated version.

[music out]

[clip: MGM logo]

In the late 90s, Mark was asked to update the logo again for the studio's 75th anniversary. And that's the one we still hear today.

[clip: current MGM logo]

Sound number five comes from the other movie Mark won an Oscar for. It’s also the fourth film in a long running franchise.

Mad Max: In this wasteland, I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead. A man reduced to a single instinct: survive.

The film was Mad Max Fury Road. And one of the most important sounds in it was a vehicle called the War Rig. It's a huge armored tanker truck that gets stolen from the bad guys by the main characters.

[music in]

As Mark was familiarizing himself with the movie, he realized that the War Rig had even more screen time than the main actors did.

Mark Mangini: And as such, I saw the War Rig as a character, and deserved the same kind of character preparation and an embodiment that an actor would give a character.

Mark Mangini: I'm always looking for references outside of what you're seeing on screen. And I thought of Moby Dick.

Moby Dick is about the obsessive quest of a character named Captain Ahab, who is seeking revenge against a murderous whale.

Mark Mangini: And I thought, "Well, you know what? There's so many references here, visual and literal. Immortan Joe is Ahab.

That's the main villain. He kinda looks like the lead singer from an 80s hair metal band, but with crazy tubes sticking out of his mouth.

Mark Mangini: He's obsessed with the white whale, The War Rig. And he's determined to chase it through the sea, the desert, and kill it and put an end to it. So from there, I thought, "Oh boy, that's a rich vein to mine. Let's think of the War Rig as a character. Let's anthropomorphize it with organic attributes."

For example, Mark used tiger growls for the scene where the War Rig is being assembled.

[music out]

[clip: War Rig assembly]

The chase scenes used both tiger and bear sounds.

[clip: War Rig chase scene]

This idea of adding animal sounds to a vehicle was also used in Raiders of the Lost Ark. On that film, Mark was one of the sound effects editors.

Mark Mangini: When Indy takes over the truck in the truck chase, you can hear lions and tigers roaring every time he revs the engine.

[clip: Indiana Jones]

Mark Mangini: And so too did we embody the War Rig with these animal sounds to make it come more to life, to make it feel like a character-creature in the movie and not just a prop.

[sfx: another growl]

Mark Mangini: When we get to the end of the film and the War Rig meets its demise, in slow motion, we see the truck roll over on itself and crash and tumble.

Here's that scene. See if you can guess what animals they used.

[clip: War Rig death scene]

Mark Mangini: We slowed down bear cries [sfx: bear cry] and whale cries [sfx: whale cry] to embody it with death sounds.

[clip: War Rig death scene]

[clip: Star Trek whale sounds]

Alright, so on to our last film. Picking just six was really tough, but see if you can guess what this one is.

[clip: Star Trek sounds]

Spok: Fascinating.

Star Trek just wouldn't be the same without its incredible sound design, and Mark has worked on a bunch of these films. But the thing he remembers most from the franchise isn't a sound, it's actually a song.

Mark Mangini: Paramount Studios had signed a deal where Capitol Records would supply any and all source music for Star Trek IV, anything that was music outside of the score.

[music in]

But Leonard Nimoy, who plays Spock and also directed the film, wasn't happy about this.

Mark Mangini: And Leonard was complaining to us often about how awful the choices were. It was all like smooth jazz and things that were completely inappropriate.

There's one particular scene where the music really didn't work. Captain Kirk and Spock are riding a bus. And there's a punk playing loud music on a boombox. But here's the problem.

[music stop]

Punks don't usually listen to smooth jazz.

Mark Mangini: Capitol had no one on their roster that made music like this.

The punk in the bus scene was actually played by Leonard Nimoy’s assistant, a young man named Kirk Thatcher… not to be confused with Captain Kirk. When they just couldn’t find any good punk music, Kirk had an idea.

[music in]

Mark Mangini: Kirk called me and said, "Let's put something in front of Leonard. You play guitar." And he sent me the lyrics and he said, "Write something and we gotta do it by Sunday." And this was Friday.

Mark Mangini: And I looked at the lyrics and I wrote the song in about 15 minutes. It's only two or three chords. Called Kirk in, and we did it in a couple of takes live in about 20 minutes. And called Leonard that Sunday afternoon, and he came to the studio and played it for him. He said, "I love it. We're gonna put it in the movie."

[music out]

The song is called I Hate You.

[clip: I Hate You]

In fact, Nimoy liked the song so much that he wanted to make a music video for it.

Mark Mangini: They still had the bridge of the Enterprise on a sound stage at Paramount, and we were going to do a music video until legal weighed in and said we weren't allowed to do that because of the contracts that Paramount had with Capitol Records. And we just missed our big shot at stardom.

[music out]

Mark Mangini: And then the coda to all of this is that, because that is such a beloved scene, this last season of Star Trek: Picard, they reprised that scene, 40 years later, they brought Kirk back as an aging punk, and we rewrote the song, and it's now called, “I Still Hate You.”

Picard Clip: “Hey, you mind stopping that noise?” “Yeah, alright fine. I just like that song. Sorry.”

Mark Mangini: Kirk can do anything. He's truly a Renaissance man.

[clip: I Still Hate You song]

[music in]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the Sound Design Studios of Defacto Sound.

This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

It was story edited by Casey Emmerling. It was sound designed by Jai Berger, Joel Boyter, and Brandon Pratt.

Thanks to Mark Mangini for sharing his amazing sonic stories with us. And also, thanks to Mike James Gallager from In Depth Sound Design for sharing that clip of Mark talking about Dune. Subscribe to In Depth Sound Design on Youtube and Instagram.

Finally, a big thanks to Pro Sound Effects for making this episode possible. Visit Pro Sound Effects dot com to learn more.

I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

[music out]