Cabinet door's squeals are eerily Chewbaccaesque

This squeaky cabinet door sounds so much like Chewbacca's plaintive wail that I'm left wondering if it isn't the source of the original foley effect.

Guys Cabinet Door Sounds Exactly like Chewbacca! (via Neatorama)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Tenn

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, as I was as enamored as you all are at first, but this one has been busted as fake long ago.

You rained!

@12 Phikus; Yay, you un-rained my parade!

Tis a good thing I don’t have a Chewie cabinet. I’d never get anything productive done.
Fixxxer

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, as I was as enamored as you all are at first, but this one has been busted as fake long ago.

Hint: at the very end of the video, notice the keyboard.
eclectro

And this is why we come to the internet.
dnono

Check out Studio 360′s profile of Ben Burtt in this weeks program. He was one of the sound artists for Star Wars (and other major films). I don’t recall him mentiong Chewbacca’s source, but he may have.
Domomojo

One of the settings on my shower head sounds like the death scream of a Slayer from Krull.
tonixtonix

Real or fake, it still made my dog go crazy!
barnaby

Dammit Chewy! Get those postit notes into overdrive!
Whiplash

Ok. I was watching Return of the Jedi last night with my kids, and Chewy sounded just like my cabinet.

The Millennium Falcon sounds just like my brother’s Dodge Aspen station wagon.
Phikus

Welcome Darth Meatloaf! I sense the farce is strong in this one. ;D
rzwrong

Don’t mean to sound pedantic but Chewbacca’s wail is not considered a foley effect. More a sound design/sound fx.
HurfDurf

#32, I came here to post that exactly! Recently amazed my Father in-law with that. He is slightly more easily amazed than me, so he spent about an hour with it. ;)
Pipenta

I always thought he sounded a lot like an elephant seal.
chunk

Wait… so is this where we place bids on the Chewie-Cabinet?
Takuan

now, why am I unsurprised to hear you know what an elephant seal sounds like?
JJR1971

“Laugh it up, Fuzzball”
Anonymous

The proximity of the keyboard doesn’t prove fakery. None of the Chewie noises sound static or “sampled.” On the contrary, they correspond exactly with the movement of the door. Looks real to me.
GammaBlog

Made me laugh. I vote real. The keyboard only indicates someone who is interested in sound.
Anonymous

I love how the general internet community is so cynical these days that the simple presence of a keyboard in the video automatically makes it a fake.

IF this was faked, it was not done in real-time with the keyboard. Sound and movement are matched up too well for that to be the case. It may have been edited manually afterwards, but I seriously doubt it.

Mainly because I have a similar cupboard door (but smaller) that makes a sound like Chewbacca’s little sister…
Phikus

Frank@15: True, with the assumption it is one person who made this.

I too find it interesting that people are quicker to believe a debunk over the original bunk on the internets these days it seems.

Anon@25: …”Chewbacca’s little sister”…

You owe me a new keyboard!

Also, get BB account. We need you around here. =D
Phikus

…err, that should have been Franko.

It seems my keyboard is still a little sticky from my spewed frosty beverage.
Phikus

Fixxxer: Sorry, I don’t buy it, being familiar with the way sampled sounds played by midi controllers work. The sound is slightly different each time and does not conform to the differences in attack and sustain that midi controllers emulate, so I think it is coincidence that there is a keyboard in the shot at the end. He used his left hand to open and close the cabinet as well, so it would be impossible to have his right hand somehow behind his back playing the keyboard at the same time. To synch up properly, it would be best to have the same person opening the cabinet and playing the sound, so why use the left hand to open the cabinet? Finally, if faking it, surely he / they would have had the sense to have simply edited that off at the end, leaving the illusion complete.

There used to be a huge sign on i-beams for Lone Star Beer outside of the Conan’s Pizza at 26th & Guadelupe here in Austin (now a Kerbey Lane Cafe.) If you would hit it with a rock, it would produce the sound of the Star Wars blasters perfectly. At some point, someone took a small boulder and placed it next to the sign, so all you would have to do was tip it over a bit to produce the sound as you went in. This became the ritual every time one went to eat their pizza and the i-beam became well scarred at the point of contact. This is what we did before the internets for fun (ok, yes it helped if you were high.) I understand the original sound engineers for Lucas went around tapping on tension cables to produce the original sounds.
smonkey

Chewie was made up of various animal sounds according to the interwebtubes (and they know everything).

http://filmsound.org/starwars/

(I’ve read all these sound sources in other places but I can’t find ‘em now)
stuhfoo

AMAAAzing
laureltree

there was a chair in my 8th grade algebra class (long long time ago in a galaxy far far away) that if you scooted it up to the desk it would sound like chewbacca. This was an endless source of amusement for my classmates.
Remez

I’d be impressed, except that my labrador retriever whining and complaining that dinner is late sounds exactly like Chewie.
Anonymous

That’s not funny. Chewbacca has been reincarnated as a cabinet.
franko

AND, #12, to add to your list…. if he was somehow opening the cabinet with his left hand, and playing the keyboard with his right hand, then he was holding the camera with his… third hand?
Anonymous

Apropos of nothing – hold a metal Slinky (coiled) to your ear and let go of the bottom so that it uncoils. Voila – instant laser gun sound effect. (Be careful if you have longish hair, it’s easy to rip out a chunk with this silly trick.)

I can’t remember how I discovered that fact, but it never ceases to amuse me.

Yes, I’m one of the teeming millions of easily amused.

Love this video too. Of course.
mrsomuch

If that was my cupboard I would open and close it all day every day. I expect that I would not have a girlfriend.

I’m not sure which is preferable…
awd

guy that did sound effects for star wars loves to use natural sounds. check out dvd extra for wall-e where he uses slinky sounds for laser guns, etc.
Keeper of the Lantern

The fact that…

a. Someone noticed this,
b. Someone bothered videoing it
c. and posted on the internet, and then
d. That I’m actually laughing and am glad at a, b and c…

is prove that we all have WAY too much time on our hands.
oscar

Waxy did a small roundup of these, likening them to the nerd equivalent of a Virgin Mary sighting. If you go to youtube you can see them all in the related videos.
Whiplash

I am all for Chewy sounding cabinets, but maybe thew nets have made me too cynical. Am I crazy to think the keyboard to the left is our culprit here?
Or have I just lost all faith in spontaneous Chewosity.
PDXHypnotist

Bunked or debunked, I don’t care.
I, and the Boxer with his ear on my laptop love this!
theLadyfingers

Zarking fardwarks, I love the internet.
Darth Meatloaf

Phikus@26 – Ask, and ye shall receive. I was the anon at 25. You may, at some random point in the future, regret this…

But I won’t!
klh

This makes me happy. I love finding things that could be sound effects.

I work at a restaurant. When I’m putting the beer glasses away, the sound they make when they slide upside down across the melamine shelving sounds exactly like the sound the TARDIS makes. It makes me giggle every time.

Yay!