This episode was written & produced by Andrew Anderson and Casey Emmerling.
Movie trailers have changed dramatically over the decades, from the classic “Voice of God” narrators of the ‘80s and ‘90s, to today’s thunderous “bwaahs” and “boojes.” In this episode, Dallas and producer Andrew Anderson take a deep dive into the evolving art of trailer sound design, breaking down the most iconic trends and overused tropes. Featuring legendary trailers from Star Wars to Predator, plus an intimidating encounter with the most famous trailer voice of all time.
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View Transcript ▶︎
[music in: Wesley Slover - Not Quite Summer]
You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.
I’m Dallas Taylor, and today, I wanna play you one of my favorite episodes from our short-lived bonus show, MicroHertz. It’s about movie trailer sound design through the decades, overused sound effects like the booj, [music stop for sfx: booj] and my personal encounter with movie trailer royalty.
It’s a lot of fun, so I decided to set it free from the paywall, and spruce it up a bit with some extra material. Enjoy.
So joining me is producer Andrew Anderson. So how are you?
Andrew: I'm doing very well. Dallas, how are you doing today?
I'm doing fantastic. You have put together a series of movie trailers, and I am so excited to hear them.
Andrew: As I was doing the research, first, I just picked out the trailers from each decade that had the highest box office. So, Jaws from the ‘70s, Titanic from the ‘90s. Then I realized actually, as I was looking, that there was one movie franchise that had a top box office rating basically in every decade. Do you wanna take a guess at which film franchise it is, Dallas?
Hmm… Superman?
Andrew: Probably there is Superman in every decade. Was there a Superman in the ‘90s? I don't remember.
Mmm, I can't remember. And I know that there's someone listening right now probably screaming, “Yes, there was!” But I don't remember.
Andrew: But it is of course [singing] Star Wars. That was the worst—That was the worst—Star Wars singing ever. I missed the first few notes.
And I love Star Wars because it was such a watershed moment for sound design in general. That first film just changed everything of the trajectory of sound design. So it's the perfect choice to illustrate the changes in movie trailer sounds.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So let's start with the very first one.
Actually, I wanted to call an audible on this.
Andrew: Oh, call an audible.
…which is great, because every time I call an audible, I have to remember, you’re British. Thankfully, you lived in the US, so you get that, but that's an American football term.
Andrew: 20! 40! Huh!
It's an American football term when a play changes just from the quarterback changing what the quarterback's yelling. And so, that's calling an audible, for those who don't know American football. And so what that audible is is I think it'd be cool to hear the most modern trailer first.
Andrew: Oh, okay.
Because I think we are so intertwined with how movie trailers are now that it's almost shocking to go back in history.
Nowadays, there's this very big trope about big epic sound, [bwaah] some sort of innocuous dialogue bite, some sort of hit or light booj [light booj] followed by a plot point, followed by a bigger booj [medium booj] followed by a pop blah, followed by followed by followed by a plot point. Then it's a mega booj into silence. [epic booj] And then you hear a creeping ‘80s reimagining song. Some sort of ‘80s classic or ‘90s classic, but reimagined all spooky-like.
Andrew: Is there any that spring to mind that have lots of boojes and things?
[epic sting]
Don: Dracula Untold, 2015. Featuring “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” originally by Tears for Fears.
[Dracula Untold trailer]
That's how I imagine trailers nowadays. Most of the big epic trailers are kind of like that. So do you have a recent movie trailer first? And then we go backward?
Andrew: Well, we have the trailer for Force Awakens from 2015, if you wanna listen to that.
Let's do it.
Andrew: Alright. Let's do it.
[Force Awakens trailer]
Oh, yeah. That's great. I'm hyped. It does follow like the bones of what a modern movie trailer does consistently.
Single note, curious dialogue bite, single note, another pushing, like little curiosity, driven dialogue a little further. Single note, maybe with another note. Little bit more bite. And then it just ramps, ramps, ramps, ramps, ramps into a release. And then either there's where your reimagined 80s track comes in or, in the case of this, they just play it cool the whole time. So this is really well done.
Andrew: Should we skip back a bit in time now? Should we go all the way back to A New Hope?
That’s where I'm really leaning toward. Let's paint the picture a little bit. Nothing like this has ever come along. So I'd really like to hear how in the world they treated this new thing that they had no idea was just going to explode.
[Star Wars 1977 trailer]
Gosh. Yeah, that is amazing. It just reminds me of… It's very kid glove. I can imagine marketing being, “These people need to know exactly what is happening, and who is in it.” Uh, very pragmatic, very matter of fact, very clear about—just like, there is no subtlety.
Andrew: I watched quite a lot of trailers for the purpose of this episode. And I realized that in the older ones, they tend to give away a lot of the plot, actually. They almost just list out. “Here's what's happening in the film. This is where the start is. It's a character he's, uh, doesn't know what he's doing. Then he goes on this adventure and look, he wins the girl at the end! Come and see the rest in the cinema.”
It's like, “Featuring Darth Vader as Luke Skywalker's father. See it now!” And I know that back then, it was a huge reveal in the theater.
Andrew: Yeah. We've topped and tailed with Star Wars there. How about we go ahead and listen to a classic 1980s trailer. Should we give Predator a go?
Of course we should.
Andrew: Here we go.
[clip: Predator trailer]
Okay. The first thing that I noticed is that, 1987, this is when MIDI and keyboards and artificial sounds were really hitting a huge stride. And you can just hear that all over this. It's almost like pulling out a Casio keyboard and going, “I'm gonna make a movie trailer out of this.” Because back then, it was like, “What? I don't have to hire instruments. I don't have to hire an orchestra. I can do it all in this little keyboard? Let's do that!” And so you, you obviously get this, nowadays, this really corny sounding epic track. But back then, it sounded so modern, so clean. But nowadays it just sounds so dated.
Andrew: Yeah.
I love the vibraslap.
[clip: vibraslap from trailer]
** I don't know if that's a fake vibraslap, or if that was like one of the real worldizing… You know, cuz what you wanna do, even if you had a fake symphony in a movie score, and you can't hire a real symphony, what you do to really fake it is you get a violinist and a cello player and you get them to play as a separate worldizing track. It gives a little bit of humanity to it. It gives a little bit of moments of being out of tune. And in here, I kinda wonder if just the big vibraslap out of nowhere is like their worldizing of this synthy track.**
Andrew: Yeah. And just, what do you think about the structure in terms of how does it compare to, let's say, the one that we heard, The Force Awakens, a very contemporary one?
Let's see. On the contemporary side, it does build. It's very clear on what the plot is. I was kind of shocked to hear the spoiler that they can see the heat of our bodies.
Andrew: Yeah.
When I watched Predator as a kid, I felt like that was just a huge reveal. “Whoa, that's how the Predator sees everyone! It's not through this normal way that humans see, it's heat generated.”
Andrew: I think in the past, they just didn't care about giving away stuff like that, did they, in trailers?
No, I think they just needed bodies in the movie theater, and they were doing what they could to hype people enough. The other thing that I found really funny about this is just how bad some of the dialogue edits were.
Andrew: Yeah, they were really off weren't they, some of them.
[Predator trailer bad dialogue edit]
We didn't have, I don't think we had any form of Pro Tools back then, or…
Andrew: How would they have been doing that? Just with razor blades, then how, how…
I believe they were doing that with razor blades probably around this time, too. So we're hearing what I believe, and I could be wrong, but I believe what we're hearing is a lot of analog tape being cut, alongside a very MIDI synth sample, new age-y score. So it's pretty interesting to hear that difference.
Andrew: And the disadvantage they had is they couldn't do a reimagining of an ‘80s track at the end, because it was the ‘80s, so…
Andrew: Should we listen to the trailer for the brand new Predator that’s coming out?
Yes.
[Prey Trailer]
*So right off the bat, I will say that there's a couple things in here that are really hard to do as sound designers. Right at the top, you heard wind [imitates wind]. That gusty wind? Something we talk about all the time at Defacto is that when you record real wind, you know what it sounds like? It sounds like [shhh].*
Andrew: Like white noise.
*It's just wide noise, for the most part. We're always looking for character in winds. So [imitates wind]. Then there's a scene right after it, that you can hear bugs in.*
[repeat clip of bugs]
That is not easy to make it that crystal clear. That wood sound of the bear being dragged away…
[repeat clip of bear dragging]
All three of those moments are like peak background sounds.
Andrew: Dallas, I have a question for you. When Defacto Sound, let's say, receives a trailer like this, what do you actually receive as sound designers?
Usually, we get a trailer that is from an editor, but all the dialogue sounds pretty rough, because oftentimes it's coming directly from the set, and it hasn't been cleaned up yet.
Andrew: Okay.
Now, sometimes, we do get that cut in the editing from the final mix too, where the dialogue sounds amazing. I have a suspicion that a lot of these sounds came straight from the movie, because of just how well thought out they are.
Not saying that trailer sound designers are incapable of doing that, ‘cuz that is not the case. But the amount of thought that went into some of these sound choices, I have a feeling that they probably pulled a lot of that directly from the background stem of the actual film itself to craft this.
[music in: Wesley Slover: Not Quite Summer]
After the break, ‘90s romcoms, and how I ended up recording the most famous trailer voice of all time.
MIDROLL
[MicroHertz Bumper]
Andrew: Shall we end now with a classic ‘90s romcom trailer? Just for a bit of fun.
Oh, I'd love that. I think that'd be the perfect cap off, because ‘90s was peak narrator.
[music in: Deja Lou - Swish]
One of the most famous narrators of all time for movie trailers was Don LaFontaine. He would roll around in a limo and go from studio to studio every day, going in and just doing kind of the, “In a world where da, da duh, duh.”
He had like one voice. Maybe like a slight variation on that voice.
[Happy Gilmore trailer]
He was just a fascinating character. Honestly, we should do a show about this, now that I'm thinking about it. But he would go just studio to studio in his limo. He had a limo driver that would pick him up, take him around.
Eventually as we got into the 2000s, he then started to get a ISDN line, which is a way that you, back in the day, could transfer high quality sound like prior to what we're doing right now, which was kind of a weird internet connection. He was just then just being able to double and triple his work. He was making so much money doing this.
[music out into The Rage: Carrie 2 Trailer trailer]
But there was a time, early in my career. I was working for G4 TV, which is, was a video game network that I felt like it was before its time. I worked there when these classic shows, Attack of the Show, X-Play, were all on the air.
[clip: X-Play commercial]
I thought it was kind of like a little magical place. All the hosts and stuff were very collaborative. We'd come in, we'd work through fun problems. But one time, when I was really green, I got booked to do an ISDN with Don LaFontaine. And I maybe had six months experience at this point at this place.
I was so intimidated, and I could not get the ISDN to work. So I had to like rush out, find another sound designer, get in there, hook it up. And I just took a backseat. I was like, “I can't—There's too much too fast here and it, I just can't do this.” But I remember Don reading for this promo or something that he was being hired for. And he was just like, you know, “Duh duh duh duh duh, duh, duh, duh.”
And I remember this really young producer that was about my age going like, “Oh thanks Don! That was really good, but can you add a little bit of smile to that?” And he was like, “Okay.” “You know, “Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.” And then the producer was. “Okay, that's good. Why don't you gimme a variation where you do this?”
And Don was just like, “Look, this is what I do. This is the voice. This is what you get.” And everyone just went silent and was like, “Cool, let's move on.” It was the most intimidating.
Andrew: Yes, yes sir!
And he wasn't even in the studio, just imagine like being in a studio where you just hear this voice—literal ‘90s voice of God.
Andrew: His nickname, wasn't it? “The Voice of God,” something like that.
Right. And he didn't and he wasn't there and it was just so intimidating, just his presence, his voice. So it was so fun.
Andrew: Yeah. Imagine that guy being your dad and him telling you off, that wouldn't be good.
So intense.
Andrew: So I think, "In a world” is probably the most famous trope.
[Planet of the Apes trailer]
Andrew: But the other one, it's that kind of, "When Harry met Sally, he was just working in a deli shop, but then..."
Andrew: It was a huge trope in the ‘90s. I think it continued a little bit into the 2000s. South Park has done parodies of it…
[South Park The Stapler trailer]
Andrew: So here's one I found, a film called Multiplicity. Let’s hear that clip now.
[Multiplicity Trailer]
Yeah, that's Don LaFontaine.
Andrew: Sounds like a totally ridiculous film.
Yeah, I just love how explain—like it just explain—And I remember in the ‘90s, people saying, “Gah! I wish movie trailers didn't explain everything!” And now we, it just doesn't do that for the most part.
Andrew: It's super formulaic, and I suppose contemporary ones are super formulaic as well, especially with some of the things you pointed out. But maybe it was a bit easier to put together those ‘90s ones, because it's just like, “Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, change music track, dialogue, dialogue.” Like you don't have to go through all of the… I mean, creating all of that epicness just sounds like hard work for the contemporary ones.
Right.
[music in: Dusty Decks - Mighty Stylus]
So predicting the future on movie trailers is something that I've been asked a lot. And to be honest, I have no idea. There's only so far epicness can go before it's just gonna become wearing. If you don't have highs and lows emotionally, or highs and lows dynamically, it just kind of turns into noise.
Andrew: Yeah. I wonder if like simplicity and sincerity, that’s possibly an answer, ‘cuz that's sort of the counterpoint to that, isn't it?
Right.
Andrew: But what that sounds like, probably the answer is already out there in more indie and lower budget films, where they're having to come up with solutions that aren't so expensive to create.
Right. I could see a lot of throwback types of trailers coming in the future where movie directors are wanting to give the feel of the ‘90s trailer, or the ‘80s style, or the early 2000s style. And in streaming services, I do hear a lot more variation in the way that movie trailers are made.
Andrew: Mmhmm.
So I don't know. I think we're in a bit of a mishmash of a lot of things for the next decade or two, when it comes to movie trailers, we'll see.
[music out into music in: Wesley Slover - Not Quite Summer]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear more at defacto sound dot com.
Andrew: This episode was written & produced by Andrew Anderson
Other Voices: and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Jade Dickey.
I’m Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.
How about that?
Andrew: Yeah, we need to process your voice so that it sounds like Don LaFontaine, though.
I would love it if there was a plugin that made me sound like Don LaFontaine.
Andrew: We'd all like that.
[laughs]
