What Would Giant Monsters from Movies Actually Sound Like?

Ever wonder how movie monsters get their sound? Remember the T-Rex in Jurassic Park? I mean how in the world did someone come up with that sound? Is that really what a T-Rex sounded like? To be honest, none of us will ever know because T-Rex lived over 65 million years ago, but that roar was pretty awesome right? So where did it come from? Here’s the full description from the man who created the sound himself, Gary Rydstrom:

The fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex is one of the biggest animals in Jurassic Park, but some of its key noises came from Rydstrom’s tiny Jack Russell terrier, Buster. “The way they animated the T. rex was very doglike, especially when it grabs the Gallimimus and the lawyer and shakes them to death,” said Rydstrom. “Every day I would see my dog playing with the rope toy and doing exactly that, pretending like he’s killing his prey.” Was Buster’s Jurassic Park cameo an isolated incident? “No, I use my pets all the time,” laughed Rydstrom. “In Terminator 2, I recorded the sound of Buster eating puppy chow, and that became the crunch when the T-1000 spiked that guy’s eye socket.”

“One of the fun things in sound design is to take a sound and slow it down: It becomes much bigger,” he continued. “That was inspired by Ben Burtt, the great sound designer from the Star Wars movies and a mentor of mine: He did the Rancor beast in Return of the Jedi by slowing a chihuahua sound down. It’s one of the secrets of sound design that if you slow something down, something small, it brings out elements of the sound that you could probably never get if you recorded something big.”

As for that bone-shivering, theater-shaking T. rex roar: “The key element of the T. rex roar is not a full-grown elephant but a baby elephant,” said Rydstrom. “So once again, a small animal making a small sound slowed down a little bit has more interest to us than what a big animal might do.”

OK, now that we know this.  What do you think that movie monsters would actually sound like in real life?  Glad that you asked because below is a new video that explores that very topic.