My career began as a sound engineer and producer, and the Hanna-Barbera sound effects

library was the fist I ever used. That was a lucky break because it was also the best. The
effects were fun to listen to and work with. They were the first of their kind. Now, flash
forward 20 years and I'm the boss at Hanna-Barbera, and the first thing I wanted to do
was to issue a comprehensive technically superior edition of the studio's greatest effects
ever. (I knew I was right when my former partner called and the firs thing he asked was
"When can I get a copy of the effects?")
Maybe these effects are so great because they have to be: The budgetary realities
of TV cartoon require us to depend on effects to help tell our stories. But more likely
they're great because of the extraordinarily talented people who created them. To find
out, we talked to TV cartoon pioneers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and sound
editors Greg Watson and Pat Foley. In this collection, we've included some of their
reminiscences dating back to the 1930's. I think you'll enjoy the priceless sound effects
secrets and behind-the-scenes information as much as I did.
Although small portions of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library have been
issued before in many other forms, this four CD set of over 2,200 effects represents the
most comprehensive collection of Hanna-Barbera sound effects ever assembled (and it
includes, for the first time anyway, our top-10 list of the most popular sounds used here at
the studio). Sound Ideas, under the supervision of our team of editors, assisted in
selecting the effects with special care: they're digitally remasterd with state-of-the-art
noise reduction techniques to make them sound cleaner-and funnier-than ever before
I'm sure you will enjoy using them as much as we do.

Fred Seibert
President, Hanna-Barbera

Sound Effects Round Table

The Hanna-Barbera sound effects are legendary and so are the men behind them. We put
together this imaginary roundtable discussion by combining separate interviews with four
of the driving forces behind this library of cartoon sound effects. The interviews with
William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, Greg Watson and Pat Foley were conducted on April 2,
1993.

Joe Barbera: We realized early on that sound effects were just as important in limited
animation as they were in full animation. In fact, more important. So we never cut back
on sound effects. See, the idea was, you would do an animation that was Tom & Jerry for
twenty years. And they won seven Oscars, and you would rally finesse them. I mean,
you did a pencil test on every single scene. And you studied them and reworked them,
and honed it down as good as you could. Then suddenly, because of the company's
problem...not our, because we were rolling very well...they closed the MGM animation
studio. So now what happens is, you go around to the various possible sources and are
turned down by everyone because they said nobody could afford to do animation for
television. To give you an idea, at MGM, we were averaging $45,000 for five minutes.
And eventually we made a quick deal with Screen Gems for five minutes for $3,000.
How do we put in all the gags and stuff with, let's say, 8,000 drawings instead of 26,000
drawings? You have to draw of every piece of knowledge and ingenuity that you ever
could think of relating to animation.

Joe Barbera: In cutting back, we had to use every trick to put over the feeling of motion
and animation, like using camera shakes, truck-ins, dissolves, quick cuts. And
miraculously, it worked. NBC picked up the very first one, which was called "Ruff &
Ready." And then I went to Chicago and sold the Huckleberry Hound show. Basically
the material we were dong had good sound effects. We used the best sound effects
people...it had good visual artwork and painting, funny characters, good stories. The one
thing it had less of was drawings. Because it's a hand business, and the more drawings
you have, the more expensive the product is. That was called limited animation. And we
were the ones that started it in the studio on LaBrea. When Huckleberry Hound won an
Emmy the very first year, it showed that it wasn't the amount of drawings, it was the
material that was carrying it.

Bill Hanna: Our sound effects library I know goes back to the early days for MGM,
which was 1937. Actually, it goes back even further. I started working at Harman and
Ising Studios in 1930. Fred McAlpin...a true pioneer...worked at Harman-Ising at the
time. When McAlpin was taken from Harman-Ising to MGM, I'm assuming he took the
entire Harman-Ising library with him.

Joe Barbera: McAlpin used to build all kinds of equipment at MGM. I mean he'd have
a doll rod bent back, attached to a piece of metal which would hit something else and
make a clang or a wack. He did a lot o that building.

Bill Hanna: All of that was done on a stage where we would record that effect. They
had all kinds of things: dishpans, guns, pop things, whistles, slide whistles. All of hat
stuff was there, and McAlpin would always be over there banging stuff and creating
sound effects. He did our sound effects for all of the Tom & Jerrys.

Joe Barbera: McAlpin was a builder of all kinds of equipment. And I think he was
taking all that lumber home later on for himself. (Laugh) He was a dedicated sound
effect guy, and he'd handle a multiple assortment of sounds that way.

Bill Hanna: Once your library is built up to a proper size, you can get any effect you
need right from your library. You don't have to go in and bang things around anymore.

Greg Watson: When Bill and Joe left MGM, the company gave them the privilege of
taking a long a nucleus of sound library.

Bill Hanna: This was all done on 35mm soundtrack.

Joe Barbera: There were rows of 35mm sound effect tracks all staring at you with every
kind of sound you could imagine written on them, and they would say things like "loud
rattling" and "soft rattling" "eerie sounds, not too scary."

Pat Foley: Some of these old effects, they try to redo them, you know, to figure out how
they were originally done. Bu I don't know how they were originally done! They're just
amazing how they did them. Some of the riccos...shotgun ricochets...various animation
sounds when they ricco off stage. I really don't know. I don't think that they actually got
a gunshot. I don't know how they did it.

Greg Watson: When we moved, it fell to my lot to collect the effects that we wanted to
keep. I picked things I knew would be difficult to get a hold of. Things, for example,
that we couldn't expect to make ourselves. Riccos, jet planes, railroad trains, and stuff
like that.

Pat Foley: The sound library is a thing that has evolved. When I got here in 62', they
already had the makings of a library that they got from MGM.

Greg Watson: We got to Hanna-Barbera with that nucleus, and then we began to
expand. And we were a little primitive at the time. For example, there was a sound we
used for Fred Flintstone's feet when he was getting started with his buggy, you know,
with his cement mixer thing. I actually recorded the patting feet on the leather sofa in
Bill Hanna's office with the flats of my hands.

Pat Foley: We all did everything. I was doing sound effects and cutting music.

Bill Hanna: You remember in the Tom & Jerry cartoons they didn't speak, it was all
effects. You remember how Tom would scream? I did all of the screams for Tom.

Pat Foley: Most sound effects libraries, they travel around.

Greg Watson: That sort of thing was the order of the day when we began. Later on,
though we did collect some sounds from other studios who were very gracious about it. I
remember once, I was all by myself at night in the cutting room at Sunset and LaBrea.
Charlie Chaplin's old studio. As I was working, I heard a woman scream. In the dead of
night it was an unsettling thing. But what I didn't realize was that another editor was
working over on the other side of the lot and he had run this scream on his moviola. So I
went to investigate the next day and I found a very nice fellow over there cutting sound
effects, and I asked him if I could borrow a Jeep sound. And he gave me a whole library
of Jeep sounds. Starts and stop, and high speed/low speed idling, the whole works, which
really was a boon at the point.

Joe Barbera: In those days, sound editors were working with 35mm negatives, and
they'd have moviolas, right? And they'd be running the film on one head and sound
effects on another head. And you looked at it, you'd say 'no, I don't think that'll do it, we
need a bigger cymbal whack.' So they'd go out and get another piece of film and lay it
right on the moviola. And they wouldn't even spool it up. They would just let it hang
down, and we'd play that again to see how it worked with the music and the voice tracks.
Greg Watson: There was a lot of experimentation, you bet.

Joe Barbera: When you lay it into the picture, it looks right with the picture, or it makes
you smile or chuckle, that' the right sound effect.

Greg Watson: Some of our effects were manufactured by running concurrent sound on
adjacent tracks, and after they were mixed in the dubbing room, we found that the
mixture was rather attractive. So we slipped those out, looped them and saved time.
Sometimes it's quite funny where a single effect would not have been that funny.

Hanna-Barbera's Greatest Hits...And Greatest Sproings, Boings and Bonks

In the long history of the Hanna-Barbera Sound Effect Library, there have been many
terrific sound used to great comic effect. But there are a few that stand out as having a
familiar ring, the unmistakable quality of having been used for a particular character or
bit business. Here are the 10 quintessential effects chosen for the Hanna-Barbera Hall of
Fame by longtime H-B editor Paul Douglas.

1. Fred Flintstone Scrambling: All cartoon hell breaks loose when Fred is rushing
around in a panic.

2. Gazoo Materializing: Cartoon sound effects editors sometime have to stretch their
imaginations. What does it sound like when Gazoo, the outer space pixie on The
Flintstones, comes into view?

3. El Kabong's Guitar Hit: In Quick Draw McGraw's alter ego as the heroic El
Kabong, his only weapon is his guitar. He doesn't play it; he clobbers the villains with it.
An unmistakable sound that adds new meaning to "striking a chord."

4. Fred Drops The Ball: When Fred Flintstone bowls, there's no telling where the ball
will go. Most likely, it will land on his foot. A classic crash from the Stone Age. (The
name reveals for the first time how it was made.)

5. Barney's Big Head Take: When a person does a take (one-half of a double take) it
doesn't really make a sound in the normal physical world, but in the cartoon Stone-Age
world of Barney Rubble and The Flintstones, it sounds exactly like this!

6. Jerry Pulls Tom's Whiskers: A familiar sound from the Golden Age of cartoons! In
those cat-and-mouse classics, Jerry the mouse often pulls the whiskers of Tom the cat.
Ouch! (For you musicians: a violin was played pizzicato while sliding up the
fingerboard.)
7. Fred's Head Hit: It's well known that Fred Flintstone has a hard head. But the
effects man must determine just how hard. Rock? Granite? Marble? Hard, but too dull.
The ringing sound of solid iron does the trick!

8. Yogi Bear's Noogin Klonk: When Yogi gets bumped on the head, he's usually in the
middle of feeding his empty stomach, hence this hollow, klonking sound.

9. George Jetson Becomes Jet Screamer: Mr. Jetson turns into a teen-age idol. You
have to hear it to understand.

10. Muttley Bites Dastardly on the Butt: We saved the best for last! This sound is so
evocative of Muttley's powerful jaws clamping onto Dick Dasterdly's soft posterior, that
few who hear it can ever forget it. A sound with real feeling.

Pat Foley: And a lot of times you find an effect by accident. You would be playing
something at a higher speed, or playing it backwards, and you say, wow, that sounds
kinda neat. So you stop, and then you will transfer it so that it would play in the right
direction for you and you have a funny new sound.

Greg Watson: Years ago when I was real young going to movies I noticed in watching
some of these Disney cartoons that the juxtaposition of two different kinds of sounds was
funny. For example, a low sound followed by a shrill sound right on the heels of a lull. It
had a humor to it that really shook me up.

Joe Barbera: And of course, as you know in our cartoons, if Fred runs across a living
room, that living room is three miles long. So you have to make the sound effect pretty
funny. And you also know if the newsboy delivers the paper to the Flintstones, it’s a big
slab of rock. He says ‘paper’ and he throws it right through the window and usually
Flintstone grabs it and gets knocked flat. Well, now you have to decide there, is it a bone-
crushing hit, or is it a funny hit? You can’t be cruel, even though you hit somebody with a
square of rock which is four or five inches thick and will decimate anybody. And those
are the decisions that have to be made.

Bill Hanna: Both Joe and I have been involved in countless dubbing sessions. I’ve done
timing on all those Tom & Jerry cartoons. I would always write-in ‘splat,’ or ‘swish’ or
‘foops’ or whatever. Something that would denote whether it’s a clank or a soft splash or
something. I would hear them in my mind and write them on the bar sheets.

Pat Foley: Generally the way it started, cartoons were scored in an effects type way,
where the music made the zips, and wind whistles and the xylo runs, running up and
down. Hoyt Curtin did a lot of that. He was a conductor and a music writer who did
numerous, numerous shows for us for years. He had this one group of boings he put
together we called Hoyt’s Boings. And it’s an assortment of different effects.

Bill Hanna: Hoyt Curtin scored practically all of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Pat Foley: There’s a sound called a blip. We call it a blip, but it’s something like a boink.
We use it for somebody getting hit on the head or somethinn g like that. Some of the
names of these sounds don’t make any sense to anybody but to the people who are using
them.

Greg Watson: We had an editor with us in the early days named Don Douglas. He most
recently was working at Universal, and he created a thing by combining violin plucks,
you know, pizzicato, and a couple of other sounds, and we called it “Pixie and Dixie
Hop”.

Pat Foley: A lot of the sounds that I have created, I created for a specific sequence where
Fred was singing a song to Wilma, and Fred was running and he tripped. We wanted to
get a nice stubbed toe thing, and we stumbled onto an accidental thing when we ran a blip
backwards. We used it, and from then on I called it “Pat’s Blip”, because it was a sound
that we hadn’t heard before. You’ll find it on our library.

Joe Barbera: All of this was really a tremendous amount of research and work. But the
fellows were good. They got some darned good sound effects.

Pat Foley: A lot of times we make our own, like letting the air out of a balloon, and the
balloon swizzles all around. And we’ve had big balloons that we’d blow up and let loose
in front of a mike, and kind of twirl it around the mike.

Greg Watson: We have one sound that we used a lot. I loved it myself, it’s called ‘heavy
metal hit.’ It was a combination of a ringing metal hit, low pitched, and some kind of a
soft sound. And we got that from Sam Horta. Sam has had his own editing company for
quite awhile. He’s still working. We used to call it Sam’s Metal ht.

Pat Foley: They were really inventing new sounds in all the pictures. And sometimes the
way of making the sound’s kind of funny. We had this mouse and they were washing
windows, and they were going around and around and around the wind ow and rub rub
rub rub. We didn’t have a sound effect for that, but I had once watched somebody on a
sound effects stage do it and I said, we can do what they did. What they did as they stand
real close do the rubtheir teeth. And as they rub their teeth, the teeth get dry and pretty
soon you get a squeak squeak squeak squeak. And when you’re close to a mike, that
sounds just like you’re rubbing real hard on glas…squeak squeak squeak squeak. You
wouldn’t think that’s the way you got a sound for rubbing on glass, but it works.

Greg Watson: Somebody came up with a rosin string sound. They put rosin on a rag and
rubbed a violin string and it gave you a good stretching, tension sound as though things
were going to snap. And we used a violin pick and rise, where the violinist plucked the
string and after he plucked it he slid his finger up the string so that the sound became
more shrill. That’s the sort of thing we would use, like, when someone pulls Tom’s
whiskers out.
Bill Hanna: Years ago, so much of an animated cartoon was done to music. There was a
bar sheet designed that had treble and bass clefs all across the top of the sheet, a sheet
probably 18 inches wide and about 12 inches tall. We would divide that into bars and set
tempos, so many frames to a beta. A 2/10 beat or a 2/16 beat…whatever. We would set
tempos for the music and write in there wherever we would want a sound effect. They
used to write the music to accommodate the sound effects.

Joe Barbera: Scott Bradley cued musically every move on the screen. That’s how they
used to do it. Now you cue it by pulling out your music library and cutting it in to fit.

Bill Hanna: I have studied music practically all my life and I have worked with the
musicians here on every cartoon that we’ve been involved with.

Greg Watson: I have a set of drums actually, cause I used to play drums. Believe it or not,
having played drums helped me a good deal in turning out rhythmic sound effects.

Pat Foley: You get a percussionist in there and that’s how a lot of these sounds were
designed. You go to a music session and you get a percussionist, and he’ll bring out his
wares. He’ll have his wind whistle and things like that, and various coconut gallops and
blop gallps that would be the animals trotting or something like that.

Greg Watson: That’s how we got “Temple Block Riot”. A whole bunch of sounds real
fast. We used it for different things, sometimes for rushing motion on somebody or
something like that.

Pat Foley: And there’s “Kim’s bass drum and cymbals.” Designed by Kim Speers, who’s
now with Ruby/Speers. He was an editor here when I started, and he named it after
himself. And what it was, it was a variation of cymbals and a bas drum being played
simultaneously and it made a nice hit, like when Fred, you know, runs into a tree. It’s a
bass drum and cymbal hit. And there’s “Crazy Bass Drum and Cymbals.” That’s probably
15 different combinations of these bass drums and cymbal hits.

Joe Barbera: Now we have sucha trememdous library, you can pretty much whip
together almost any sound you want out of the variety of sounds we have.

Pat Foley: Everybody eventually renames some of these things, you know, because they
go from studio to studio, they will use an effecti…like if I had designed that one for Fred
stubbing his toe, then all of a sudden somebody else uses it for somebody hitting
somebody on the head. It just get used on down he line. And when you hear the sound
you say, oh, that should be him stubbing his toe! It’s a very creative area, and there’s
more than one way to use an effect as we find out.

Greg Watson: Nowadyas I hear sound effects in commercials that came from Hanna-
Barbera.

Pat Foley: I know that a lot of the stuff that we have created here I hear on Saturday
morning shows and other animated shows done by other producers. And also I’ve heard
certain effects that are on radio shows and things like that.

Greg Watson: Some of them are so definite, it’s impossible to miss them. There was one
sound that we seldom used because it sounded like a social blunder – a gasspass, if you
know what I mean. We called it ‘bork.’ And I heard that recently on a commercial.

Pat foley: I recognize our effects. You know, after you listen to them for so long, you
recognize them.

Greg Watson: When editors left they often took some sound effects wth them after
working at Hanna-Barbera – And some of them ended up cutting commercias, so
naturally the sounds are going to show up.

Pat Foley: Sound effects editors travel around. It’s not like music. There’s no way that
you can keep sound effects. Other editors come here, they like some sunds, they create
sounds, then when they leave they take ‘em with them.

Joe Brabera: You had to care about sound effects to work here. The intent, the drive, was
to make the sound effects different. Otherwise you would just be repeating the same stuff
over and over again. Like for instance, I had a little kid come in here as a visitor. In fact
you might know him, Gary Coleman, he hadhis own show for awhile. This little guy
walked in to me, he was really a bright, bright little guy, and he said to me, ‘You have
some shows on Saturday morning and they’re lousy.’ So I’m about to punch him ut, you
know? I can do that, he’s a little guy. But I said, ‘Lousy? What do you mean?’ He says,
‘Yeah, you have two shows and you use the same sound effects on each show.’ That
shows you what a smart kid he was. So I then dared to ask him, ‘What shows are you
talking about? Well, it wasn’t our shows! It was two shows being done by another
company. This smart little guy laid it on me. But it gives you an idea of how you don’t
fool around with Mother Nature. Or a good cartoon fan.