The sound itself is a registered trademark and service mark, owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. She taught it to herself as a young girl and once taught it to opera singer Beverly Sills. Comedian Carol Burnett would do the yell on request during a question and answer weekly session on her comedy sketch series The Carol Burnett Show.The first part of the sound plays normally but when it reaches the half way point, it becomes the same sound but played in reverse. The yell, as used in the six MGM films, is a palindrome, it sounds the same when played backwards, indicating some manipulation in the sound editing department. His version is supported by his son and by his Tarzan co-star, Maureen O'Sullivan, and biographer John Taliaferro who writes that "the noise was nothing more than Weissmuller's own yodel, which he had acquired, after a fashion, from the German beer halls and immigrant picnics of his youth". Weissmuller maintained that the yell was actually his own voice. It was a commentary on the mystique of talkies and the bizarre singularity of the yell itself that the public accepted the studio's fib as fact." Biographer John Taliaferro recounts how MGM studios "concocted a story that the sound was actually the invention of engineers, who had blended Weissmuller's own voice with a hyena's howl played backward, a camel's bleat, the pluck of a violin, and a soprano's high C. Another widely published notion concerns the use of an Austrian yodel played backwards at abnormally fast speed. Īccording to politician Bill Moyers, the yell was created by combining the recordings of three men: one baritone, one tenor, and one hog caller from Arkansas. Leech suggested a form of yodel as "a real wild sound", and says that he went on to record the cry for the first three Tarzan films, with Weissmuller later learning to perform it himself. Leech recalls inventing the Tarzan yell at a promotional event for the film, where a representative of the studio had said that the yell was still to be decided. Leech performed opera from the 1940s into the '60s, winning the Chicagoland Music Festival on August 17, 1946, and went on to sing throughout the U.S., touring with several opera companies. One claim is that the yell was developed and recorded by opera singer Lloyd Thomas Leech. The yell was a creation of the movies based on what Burroughs described in his books as simply "the victory cry of the bull ape."Īlthough the RKO Picture version of the Tarzan yell was putatively that of Weissmuller, different stories exist as to how the Tarzan yell was created. The Tarzan yell or Tarzan's jungle call is the distinctive, ululating yell of the character Tarzan as portrayed by actor Johnny Weissmuller in the films based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs starting with Tarzan the Ape Man ( 1932). Problems playing this file? See media help.
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