Star Wars With Homemade Sound Design Should Be The New Hollywood Standard
This article is more than 2 years old
Here at GFR, we’re accustomed to Star Wars fans taking things to extremes with franchise-inspired arts and crafts. In fact, we could probably make our living based solely on stories related to George Lucas’ original universe. (Cha-ching!) Did you just make that cash register noise in your head? If so, you’re bound to enjoy the above video for Star Wars: The Bad Foley edition, in which the sound effects have all been removed and replaced with those made by a human.
Specifically, that human is Eugene, Oregon freelance writer and Internet-humor purveyor Hudson Hongo, who is responsible for such pleasurable time-wasters as the Amazon comment collection Least Helpful and the measurement converter What’s That in Danzigs?, where you’ll discover that 10,000 joules equals 9 Glenn Danzigs. In any case, his videos are just as playful, spinning familiar concepts in fun and interesting ways. This is a version of Star Wars that you’ve never specifically seen before, complete with manmade bleeps and bloops instead of R2-D2’s digital speech patterns, and Monty Python-esque clops instead of footsteps. Whirring sounds instead of…actual lightsaber noises. It’s not the most laugh-out-loud experiment, but it begs to be repeated with a host of other films, or perhaps a feature-length effort, where only the actors’ dialogue remains from the original version.
This isn’t just bad sound design, as the title suggests. It’s really well-made mouth-crafted effects, plus an extremely well-timed “Freebird” reference.
When he isn’t breathing heavily into microphones, Hongo honors literature with a series of videos in which he manages to share entire novels in the amount of time it takes you to blink. Or something like that, anyway. Open your mind for Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
