|
|
By John Michlig
Excerpted from GI JOE: THE COMPLETE STORY OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE MAN OF ACTION (Chronicle Books) |
Order a copy of
GI JOE: THE COMPLETE STORY OF AMERICA'S FAVORITE MAN OF ACTION autographed by the author HERE
Entertainment Weekly review.
Flickr photos below
Order the GI JOE DOCUMENTARY based on my book (in DVD and VHS formats) HERE.
ON THEIR RESUMES, WOULD THAT APPEAR ABOVE OR BELOW "MADE GI JOE SPEAK"?
In Speeding The Net, authors Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla describe Bolt Baranek and Newman, creators of GI Joe's voice mechanism, as "the legendary Cambridge consultants who had designed and built the original subnetwork of routers that moved packets of data across the early ARPANET, decades before the government sponsored network grew into the Internet."
Bolt Baranek and Newman is now known as GTE Internetworking. I spoke again to Dr. Heine recently, and he said that they are in the process of interviewing for various management position. "Nowadays, we tell all out applicants that we helped invent the internet, and made GI Joe talk."
I sent Dr. Heine a recently-produced replica of the Talking GI Joe to help his recruiting effort. Anything for the guys who created the internet, right?
Quentin Tarantino
on GI Joe
From YESTERDAYLAND.COM
YL: I know you liked playing with G.I. Joe's, what do you remember about playing with them or other toys?
QT: When it comes to G.I. Joes, if you were ever unlucky enough to be assigned to my battalion, it was pretty much a suicide mission. I was quite the bastard because if you lost a leg, that didn't mean s*** to me, alright, you gotta keep on fighting. You lost your head? I didn't give a f***. You lost an arm? Amputees? I don't give a f***. Cripples fight just like everybody else. That was just the way. Now if that rope in the middle broke, okay, then you're retired. I didn't have enough imagination to make a hip bone the entire G.I. Joe, but you know, his arm his leg or whatever- it didn't matter, he still fought, he still played. Actually, the truth, though, is that I never really played war with them. I did what I do. I'm a director, alright? So, they were my actors. Mostly, it wasn't so much that I saw a movie and then went out and acted it out at home with the G. I. Joes. It was more like I saw the commercial for a movie I wanted to see then I took my G.I. Joes and made the movie. My version of what I thought I would see. The exception is when my dad took me to see Diamonds are Forever. I saw it at the Grauman's Chinese Theater back when it was still Grauman's. It was great. So then I was, like, playing G.I. Joe and James Bond and Blofeld and all of those characters. The thing is, I would play them and I would give them (see, I grew up in the 70's, and my parents would take me to see R-rated movies) so I had the dialog, they would be saying, you know 'Okay, you son-of-a-bitch, kiss your ass good-bye'. My uncle, who was taking care of me, would say 'Quentin, what is all of that going on?' And I was like, 'No, it's not me! It's the characters.' It's them. They're saying their dialog. It's the characters. Oddly enough, my mom kind of understood. He'd complain to my mom and she'd say 'Leave him alone. What do you care? He's in his room. He's playing with his dolls. What do you care what he says? Shut your ears, it's his room. There is not another human being in the room; he can say what he wants'.
FURTHER READING
GI JOE: The Complete Story of America's Favorite Man of Action by John Michlig (Chronicle Books)
Visit HASBROCOLLECTORS.COM, where you can order autographed copies.
The GI Joe Masterpiece Edition
Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between GI Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them by G. Wayne Miller.
LINKS to GI Joe collector and enthusiast sites.
GITROOPER'S GI JOE PAGE is the best welcome wagon for new collectors and persons just starting out in the hobby.
HASBROCOLLECTORS.COM
THE WOLF FILES at ABCNEWS.COM:
"All Dolled Up"
Travellin' Joe
One lucky GI Joe action figure travels the world, and you are there.
Back to THE GILL NET HOMEPAGE
Contact John Michlig
|
As Hasbro's Don Levine watched GI Joe projected on a big screen at the 1966 Toy Fair sales meeting, with a voice-over shouting, "Storm the hill, men!" he leaned over to Merrill and jabbed him with his elbow, "Wouldn't it be something if we could get our guy to talk like that?"
 The comment was made half in jest, but by June Hasbro was meeting with Bolt Baranek and Newman, Inc*., a local consulting firm with expertise in sound reproduction. Sam Speers recalls sitting down and describing what was needed to some very confident representatives from the firm. "No problem," was the quick answer, illustrated by complex diagrams and equations on a blackboard.
In truth, BB&N was facing a job unlike anyone had ever tackled before. "We had absolutely no clue how to make this work," recalls Dr. John Heine, one of the BB&N engineers. "I bet we didn't make any significant progress for the first six months."
Hasbro's requirements for GI Joe's voicebox were very strict. The entire mechanism needed to be built for under 42¢ and fit inside Joe's chest cavity, which would be redesigned as a two-piece unit to accommodate whatever BB&N could come up with.
"Mattel had a parallel product in it's plush toys, which was a record player. When you pulled its string, it spoke random phrases," remembers Heine. "It was decided early on that we didn't want that with GI Joe. If you're a kid playing with Joe, you want to pick what he says. We were also under the impression that Mattel had patented key features that we needed, so some elements of what we eventually invented were weaker than they could have been." The Mattel device was also much larger than required for GI Joe; approximately the size of a human heart.
BB&N decided that a linear recording-sound units embedded one after another on a straight stretch of tape, rather than on a round record with units separated by tracks-could both conform to the small space constraint and provide a manner with which individual phrases could be selected by longer or shorter pulls on a string. A color code on the cord would indicate how far to pull for any given phrase. Still, it seemed impossible to self-power the mechanism at a rate that would play back the tape smoothly.
According to Heine, the answer hinged on one single component. "The key to it all was the 'negator spring.' At a factory in Pennsylvania, somewhere outside Philadelphia, someone showed us a model of that spring; it just clicked that this was the way to power the device. If you look into the voicebox, you'll see that there's a metal band that, when you pull the string, unwinds from one side to the other. When the thing is wound it's in a stable state, which is a coil. When you pull the string, you unwind the band into an unstable state where it wants to go back into that coiled state. It's sort of a reverse tape; as it winds, it pulls the vinyl tape from one reel to the other." The negator spring allowed for a smooth transit of tape through the mechanism.
After a trip to New York to record test tracks that were then transferred to a vinyl tape medium for integration into the voicebox unit, BB&N was finally ready to present a prototype-nine months after their initial meeting, much to Hasbro's chagrin.
"Hasbro didn't understand how we worked," says Heine. "They'd never really been involved with a consulting company before. The work ethic and methodology was much different at BB&N than it was at Hasbro. They were always trying to figure out why we weren't there at eight in the morning and never seemed to be around when they called."
Indeed, none of the staff at Hasbro-accustomed as they were to total, around the clock immersion in a particular problem or project until a result was achieved-was comfortable with what they perceived as very slow progress. Having an invention "made to order" was not the general mode of operation in toy production; Hasbro was used to outside inventors coming in with thought-out ideas and mechanisms that needed only be made practical for manufacturing.
After weeks of listening to audition tapes, a local DJ named King Arthur Knight* was selected to create a soundtrack of appropriate-and, after some long hours, inappropriate-phrases for GI Joe to speak. Each phrase was recorded multiple times with the inflection falling differently on each take ("GI Joe reporting for duty, sir!" "GI Joe reporting for duty, sir!" "GI Joe reporting for duty, sir!"), and these tracks were then played and replayed in the creative department ad nauseam until the proper version of each could be settled upon-a total of thirty-two final phrases.
When tested for clarity in the mechanism, unfortunately, blind trials revealed that only half of the listeners polled could identify what was being said; the sound was far less than crystal clear. Disaster was averted when someone came up with the shrewd idea of printing each phrase on a box insert. When the test was repeated, recognition went up to ninety-nine percent.
Talking GI Joe introduced a new limitation that none of his forebears suffered: He could not be submerged in water without damaging the voicebox mechanism. The unfortunate lapse neatly underlined the miscommunication between BB&N and Hasbro --- another of Bolt, Baranek and Newman's clients was the U. S. Navy, for whom they developed underwater sound systems.
______
UPDATES
* Bolt Baranek & Newman were engaged by the House Select Assassinations Committee in 1976 to work on acoustics evidence in the re-investigation of the shooting of John F. Kennedy, and also took part in examination of the Watergate tapes in 1973. It was BB&N that proclaimed the famous "18-minute gap" in the Nixon recordings to be a deliberate erasure.
* I recently learned that the recollection of Hasbro's Sam Speers was faulty (King Arthur Knight actually voiced follow-up versions), and the actual voice of GI Joe for the very first "Talkers" was Bill Corsair, a disc jockey at WICE-AM radio. Soon after the gig, Corsair's National Guard unit was called to serve in Vietnam. Corsair remembers being paid $100 for the GI Joe session, which he also engineered.
Among other honors, Bill Corsair was awarded for his tour of duty the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Combat Air Medal, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry while serving with the First Air Cavalry Division.
© 2008 John Michlig
Back to THE GILL NET HOMEPAGE
john@fullyarticulated.com
GI Joe (R) is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc.
|