Where did the trend of lasers sounding like “pew! pew!” come from, originally?
By the time Star Wars came around, was that already a common meme?
In the Trek Original Series, the phasers were more like sustained pulses of whines, like pscheewwwww pscheewwww, right?
Was there a particular show/movie/radio show or similar that forever entrenched the sounds of laser guns in popular sci-fi?
I think it might have started with Star Wars. IIRC the sound department wanted a sound for the guns and settled on whacking a telephone pole guy-wire with a wrench to get the pew pew sound (I always thought Foley artists had a cool job).
Looking at old Flash Gordon movies the spaceships sounded like propeller planes and the handguns sounded like electricity.
Ben Burtt, who was the sound designer for the Star Wars films, has indicated that discovering that particular sound was accidental: he was out hiking, and his backpack frame caught on a guy wire while he was walking underneath it.
I agree that it seems likely, barring any cites otherwise, that Star Wars was the vehicle that popularized a short, percussive sound (sort of like a gunshot), rather than a longer whine, for a laser gun or similar energy weapon.
It was a radio tower guy wire, but I knew a telephone pole guy wire as a kid that sounded the same.
Yep. I used to whack a telephone pole guy wire when I was a kid in the late-'60s. I thought the sound was the coolest.
Lasers don’t go “pew pew”. Classically, ray guns go “Zap!” IT’s even in the title of a book I read.
The reason then went zap was, I’ve suggested, by analogy with high voltage electrical arcs.
Ray guns, lasers, and phasers generally had a whirring or whooshing sound – look at Star TRek or the laseer in Goldfinger.
Ray guns that fired short bursts tended to have an interipted sound, to go with the bursts, which is close tou your “oew pew” sound. Look (and listen) to the blaster in Forbidden PLanet
So can I say that “I know a guy who knows a guy”?
Ben Burtt always layered his sound effects, so even when it was predominantly a zap there was a harsh percussive layer and a whoosh layer, and varying their pitch or swapping alternative clips allowed for subtle variance to make them not sound repetitious.
Reminds me of the 1950s version of War of the Worlds which had both. The Heat Rays had drawn out sounds, the green disintegration blasts a much shorter sound (YouTube link, noisy).
Also, I’ve heard the green disintegrator sound effect used elsewhere since, such as the Sniper attack for the Radiation Blast powerset in City of Heroes. I used to get that just because I liked the sound so much.
Cal’s being modest about his How the Zap Gun Got its Zap, a very good read.
If I were as modest as Cal I wouldn’t link to How the Zap Gun Got Its Name but I’m not so I will.
For me it was the early 70s but same experience. In college there was a telephone poll guy wire next to my dorm which also had an excellent sound when whacked. I did it almost daily for years. Never got old. Such a cool sound.
BTW, I’m so glad no one has made a joke about ‘whacking the telephone pole guy’. That would be childish.
But instead we’re stuck with lasers that only work in church, hence the “pew, pew.”
“Park bench, park bench!”
(Edit: image doest show in the Onebox, so…)
Groan…That’s brutal, in a good way.
There’s also a “The Edge” FM station in Toronto and they are very edgy. In 1998 they had a “Princess for a Day” contest (a year after the death of Princess Diana), which was incredibly tasteless but extremely funny.
you must be wired in with the right people!
Nitpick (because that’s what we do around here):
You wrote about Zap Guns.
Cal wrote about Ray Guns.
There’s a follow-up piece in my other Weird Optics book about hand-held ray guns (the earliest ones, like the Martian Heat Rays in H. G. Wells, were basically ray cannons). A. Merritt briefly gave them to us in Conquest of the Moon Pool (1919), but they really took off when it was introduced in the comic strip *Buck Rogers in the 25th CenturyThe book is called a decade later.
The book is called Sandbows and Black Lights
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/sandbows-and-black-lights-9780197518571?cc=us&lang=en&
As I understand my movie history, sound effects - especially in SciFi - came strongly into vogue with the invention of the Theremin in the 1950s. Then came the Moog Synthesizer in 1964, and the silent vacuum of space was doomed forever.
Star Wars guns aren’t lasers or ray guns, though, right? They shoot individual projectiles made of energy.