Even if you've never seen a loon, you've heard its call, as Hollywood uses it over and over. But it drives birders nuts. See, the loon lives in Canada during the summer, and along the US-Mexico border in winter. Yet if you watch enough movies, you'll think "that bird" belongs everywhere, even on other planets. Vox explains why Hollywood is so obsessed with the call of the loon.
Friday, October 15, 2021
That Bird Call That's in Every Movie
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5 comments:
They're right, in the video, about people and that sound. I make sound environments and sound effects for a small-town theater company --or rather /made/, for the decades when we could have plays, with everyone sitting close and breathing in each other's faces and smelling each other's perfume and farts and cosmetics and everything they had for dinner. For one play --which might have been On Golden Pond ("The loons, Henry!"; it was so long ago I don't remember which play exactly, twenty years, maybe-- but I do clearly remember this: I used a loon sound for where the script called for a loon, and on the intermission a tall thin middle-aged aristocratic-English-looking woman with prominent bulgy eyes accosted me in the lobby, furious, about the sound effects. She said, "That's not a loon!" I said, "What's not a loon? The loon sound?" She said, "That's /not/ a /loon/." I said, "Well, I listened to a bunch of things that said they were loons and I picked the one I liked. I'm pretty sure it's a loon." She insisted, "That's /not/ a LOON. I grew up where there were loons. I heard them all the time!" She wasn't drunk or anything, she just wanted me to fix something that made her really mad. (It was the same loon sound as all those times in your video, maybe with a little more reverb on it.)
Now that I'm thinking about it, I saw that woman in other places and I remember she wanted people to call her the Rabbit Lady. Maybe she raised rabbits or just liked them a lot. I don't know. Maybe they weren't really rabbits; maybe they were little tigers or kangaroos. Maybe she had everything switched around, like a coffee cup was called a pencil sharpener. Maybe that would explain it.
I admit I've missed the loons, possibly because we don't have them around here (or possibly because I watch so few movies anymore,) but one of the worst is a kookaburra, which makes it into every jungle movie despite the fact that it's Australian - I think a lot of people believe it's a monkey or something.
There's also the call of the red-tailed hawk, the classic descending screech, which is dubbed into footage for every bird-of-prey seen, including bald eagles, to the point where very few people know what a bald eagle actually sounds like (it's not as majestic.) Amusingly, the one place where a red-tailed hawk was actually used as a subject, a battery commercial I believe, the idiots dubbed in the sound of a crow when it flew off. My dad and I were laughing so hard...
The reliance on sound effects is definitely overblown. I remember watching one of David Attenborough's clips about slugs, and naturally someone had to dub in some kind of sticky sound when they moved. You will encounter nothing more silent, but...
Lot's of loons in Maine. You can get one on
your license plate. Their song is something
I always look forward to when I'm up in the
North Maine Woods and near water.
Fascinating! I've never realized how used, abused and misused the call of the loon is in movies! Now I'll be listening more carefully.
There is nothing to compare to the call of a loon on a northern Canadian lake during a late summer evening. So haunting. It is the sound of Canada itself.
Never thought of that call as creepy.
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