question: How was the cartoon "SPLAT" sound effect made?
comment: It depends on the splat. Food is used a lot for that in foley art. Canned dog food, jello, anything gushy, really, dropped from a height. Water or something more viscous can be added for layering or composite sounds.
passages: The opening theme and other music for the series are produced by Carl Finch and composed, arranged, and performed by Finch and his Grammy-award-winning band, Brave Combo.
  
  Section::::Reception.
   The main, pulsing bassline rhythm was created from a recording of a single plucked string, played over and over again in different patterns created by splicing copies of the sound, with different pitches and notes achieved by playing the sample in different speeds. The swooping melody and lower bassline layer were created by manually adjusting the pitch of oscillator banks to a carefully timed pattern. The non-swooping parts of the melody were created by playing a keyboard attached to the oscillator banks. The rhythmic hissing sounds, "bubbles" and "clouds", were created by cutting tape recordings of filtered white noise.
   The Yak Bak SFX provided the same function as the Yak Bak WarpR but with additional buttons that added six sound effects before or after the recording.
  
  Section::::Yak Bakwards.
  
  Retail priced at $19.99, the Yak Bakwards was essentially the Yak Bak WarpR with an additional "Yalp" button. This button literally reversed the "Play" function, causing the recording to be reversed.
  
  Section::::Yak Bak Ball.
   What is considered today to be the first recorded sound effect was of Big Ben striking 10:30, 10:45, and 11:00. It was recorded on a brown wax cylinder by technicians at Edison House in London on July 16, 1890. This recording is currently in the public domain.
  
  Section::::Processing effects.
   Most of the arm movements of Number 5 were controlled by a "telemetry suit", carried on the puppeteer's upper torso. Each joint in the suit had a separate sensor, allowing the puppeteer's arm and hand movements to be transferred directly to the machine. He was also voiced in real-time by his puppeteer, the director believing that it provided for a more realistic interaction between the robot and the other actors than putting in his voice in post-production, although a few of his lines were re-dubbed later.
   Completing a level of the game triggers a voice saying "Yippee!". On the ZX Spectrum release this was remarkable due to it overcoming the Spectrum's rudimentary sound capabilities. It was a very early use of digitized speech sound effects in home computer games.
  
  Section::::Promotion.
  
  In a launch promotion Incentive Software offered 500 pounds to the player with the highest score by 14 January 1984. The prize was won by 17-year-old James Tant, with 112,930 points. This was the first of Incentive Software's game-promoting competitions, for which the company was named.
  
  Section::::Releases.
   From 1957 to 1969, Gerry Anderson produced many television series starring marionettes, starting with Roberta Leigh's "The Adventures of Twizzle" and ending with "The Secret Service". Many of these series (the most famous of which was "Thunderbirds") employed a technique called Supermarionation, which automatically synchronized the pre-recorded character dialogue to the puppets' mouth movements. Anderson returned to puppetry in 1983 with "Terrahawks" and the unaired pilot "Space Police" in 1987.
   The Rock-afire Explosion
  
  The Rock-afire Explosion is an animatronic robot band that played in Showbiz Pizza Place from 1980 to 1992. In 1992 when they rebranded the band was replaced by Chuck E. Cheese characters. The show was created and manufactured by inventor Aaron Fechter, creator of Whac-A-Mole, through his company Creative Engineering, Inc. in Orlando, Florida; in addition to overseeing the production of the animatronics, Fechter also provided the voices for several characters.
   The system developed by deGraf/Wahrman to perform Mike Normal was later used to create a representation of the villain Cain in the motion picture "RoboCop 2", which is believed to be the first example of digital puppetry being used to create a character in a full-length motion picture.
  
  Trey Stokes was the puppeteer for both Mike Normal's SIGGRAPH debut and "Robocop II".
  
  Section::::History and usage.:Sesame Street: Elmo's World.
   A Laffing Sal is one of the several automated characters that were used to attract carnival and amusement park patrons to funhouses and dark rides throughout the United States. Its movements were accompanied by a raucous laugh that sometimes frightened small children and annoyed adults.
  
  Section::::Implementations.:Modern attractions.:Film and television.
  
  The film industry has been a driving force revolutionizing the technology used to develop animatronics.
   The Poo-Chi could "sing" one of 6 songs when following the light sensor in its nose being activated, the touch sensor on its head was pressed. The toy would then emit a series of high-pitched beeps. The user could afterwards press the touch sensor, the number of times the sensor having been pressed corresponding to a different tune. The different songs the Poo-Chi could play are as follows:
   The sound of the respirator function of Vader's mask was created by Ben Burtt using modified recordings of scuba breathing apparatus used by divers. The sound effect is trademarked in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under Trademark #77419252 and is officially described in the documentation as "The sound of rhythmic mechanical human breathing created by breathing through a scuba tank regulator."
   For "Saw IV", the prop crew again made the body of waterjet-cut foam, held together by metal rods. They used strong magnets to make a flat rear for the puppet, so it could be easily positioned on any metal surface. The resin-filled ping-pong ball eyes were moved with a remote control, as was the mouth.
  
  Section::::Appearances in films.
  
  Section::::Appearances in films.:"Saw".
   Unlike other animatronic shows of the early 1980s, the Rock-afire Explosion was designed to be life-sized, with most of the performers being about the size of an average adult human. Additionally, Fechter implemented the use of latex masks for the characters' faces, as opposed to the rubber and Styrofoam masks common in animatronics of the time. The latex masks were designed to fit over various movable parts on the characters' faces, permitting them a range of facial expressions, including smiling and the raising of eyebrows. Fechter also implemented computer programming that permitted some of the characters to move in rhythm with music, making it theoretically possible for them to play actual instruments.
   Some of their famous sound effects included a rapid bongo drum take used for when a character's feet were scrambling before taking off, a "KaBONG" sound produced on a guitar for when Quick Draw McGraw, in his Zorro-style "El Kabong" crime fighting guise, would smash a guitar over a villain's head, the sound of a car's brake drum combined with a bulb horn for when Fred Flintstone would drop his bowling ball onto his foot, an automobile's tires squealing with a "skipping" effect added for when someone would slide to a sudden stop, a bass-drum-and-cymbal combination called the "Boom Crash" for when someone would fall down or smack into an object, a xylophone being struck rapidly on the same note for a tip-toeing effect, and a violin being plucked with the tuning pegs being raised to simulate something like pulling out a cat's whisker.
   The robot voices of the Cylons in "Battlestar Galactica" were created with an EMS Vocoder 2000. The 1980 version of the "Doctor Who" theme, as arranged and recorded by Peter Howell, has a section of the main melody generated by a Roland SVC-350 Vocoder. A vocoder was also used to create the iconic voice of Soundwave, a character from the Transformers series.
  
  In 1967 the Supermarionation series "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons" It was used in the closing credits theme of the first 14 episodes to provide the repetition of the words "Captain Scarlet".
   The "Castle Bravo" device was housed in a cylinder that weighed and measured in length and in diameter.
   Robotic voice effects
  
  Robotic voice effects became a recurring element in popular music starting in the second half of the twentieth century. Several methods of producing variations on this effect have arisen.
  
  Section::::Vocoder.
   Voiced by actor and singer Sheb Wooley, the sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in "The Charge at Feather River", a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. This was its first use from the Warner Bros. stock sound library, although "The Charge at Feather River" is believed to have been the third film to use the effect.
   Section::::History.:Introduction of the Maestro FZ-1 and FZ1a.
  
  The Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone was designed by recording engineer Glenn Snoddy and WSM-TV engineer Revis V. Hobbs and manufactured by Gibson. Snoddy and Hobbs held U.S. Patent #3,213,181 issued October 19, 1965. Gibson introduced the FZ-1 in 1962, the first commercially available fuzzbox to gain widespread acceptance.
   In the original broadcast, the labors were making more metallic "kshang!" sound, but were revised to motor whirring sound like that of the movie when the whole series was released on Laserdisc.
  
  Section::::Episodes.
  
  The 47 episodes aired on NTV from October 11, 1989 to September 29, 1990.
  
  Section::::Home video.
   After that final disaster, the audience discovers the reason for the catapult's "artificial intelligence." The camera zooms in towards the manufacturer's nameplate and reveals that the catapult had been built, not by ACME, but by the "Road-Runner Manufacturing Company — Phoenix * Taos * Santa Fe * Flagstaff." The Road Runner on the nameplate then comes to life, gives the audience a "Beep-Beep" and then zooms off.
   The sound effect used for Cop-Tur's blades when flying were later used for the Autobot Sandstorm's blades in the Transformers series.
  
  Section::::Challenge of the Gobots.:Animated series.
   Because animating a mouth in synchronization with sound was difficult, Syncro-Vox was soon used as a cheap animation technique, such as in the cartoons produced by Cambria Studios: "Clutch Cargo", "Space Angel", and "Captain Fathom", in which actors' lips voicing the scripted dialogue were laid over the animated figures.
  
  Section::::Comedic uses.
   Approximately 100 Snipets were produced between 1972 and 1978. They aired until approximately sometime in 1982 on Field Communications Stations and held on for a few more years in sporadic showings on other non-Field Stations.
  
  Many of the more memorable ones are as follows:
  
  -"Come Back Here Can", which showed kids how they could take a coffee can and a rubber band and create a toy that would roll back to them when pushed.
  
  -"Buzzsaw", which teaches kids how to create a buzzsaw-like toy using string and some light wood.
  
raw_presuppositions: One cause creates the cartoon "SPLAT" sound effect.
raw_corrections: The cartoon "SPLAT" sound effect can be created from many causes depending on the sound.