As I’m want to do, I was watching an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show late one evening. The episode was, “Christmas and the Hard-Luck Kid II“. In it, Mary is alone in the news room late on Christmas Eve. Someone has entered the building and she’s frightened, jamming the door with a chair. She stands back and then hears an elevator start up. I heard the sound and was immediately amused by the recognizable sound. Watch the video: judge for yourself. (Sound required, of course.)
Some related trivia:
- The photon torpedo sound was originally created for the “skeleton ray” in George Pal’s War of the Worlds.
- The sound was created by hitting a high-tension wire (like on an antenna tower) with a hammer. (Which I remember accidentally discovering as a child, standing at my bus stop, when I hit a nearby tension wire that held a utility-pole.
- Photon torpedoes were introduced fairly late into the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series. They made their on-screen debut in the 19th episode of the series, “Arena“. Before that, when the USS Enterprise fired shots that looked like globular bursts, they were identified in dialogue as proximity blasts from the phasers, as in “Balance of Terror“. In fact, the early writer’s guide, The Star Trek Guide, made no mention of the ship having photon torpedo armaments.
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