'Totally An "M" Thing': Jeff Wells Vs. NY Times in Sound-Effect Battle Royale
The Reeler would like to take this opportunity to thank Jeffrey Wells, the Hollywood Elsewhere gadabout whose close reading of the Sunday New York Times yielded an essential distinction:
Charles Solomon’s N.Y. Times piece about how annoyingly verbal animated features have become refers to Chuck Jones’ Roadrunner [sic] /Wile E. Coyote cartoons as an example of the non-verbal, all-visuals approach that used to rule in the old says. But hold on…Solomon says the Roadunner [sic] cartoons “took place in a silence broken only by music, sound effects and an occasional ‘beep-beep.'” Inaccurate, dawg. The Roadrunner sound is an unmistakable meep-meep. Listen to one closely. At no time do you hear the “b” consonant — it’s totally an “m” thing.
As the unofficial arbitrator in all Times Movie Section corrections, I must side with Wells on this. A quick listen–not even as closely as Wells requests–indicates that Solomon not only mischaracterized the Road Runner’s signature sound, but also truncated it; if we include that tongue-whip thing at the end, we get something along the lines of “meep-meep puh-THUNG-kitty-thung-thung.”
That neither Solomon nor Wells upheld their usual, thorough factchecking standards here is a severe disappointment, but as we should expect, Wells regains his swagger with journalistic trash-talk like “Inaccurate, dawg” and “‘it’s totally an ‘m’ thing.” And for the first time since before the Oscars, I feel alive again on a Monday morning.
You might be interested to know that there was a garage band in the mid-1960s called Meep Meep and the Roadrunners. That’s Meep Meep, not Beep Beep. This would seem to me to be a good contemporary source.
Wikipedia weighs in:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beep-beep
The consensus seems to be that it sounds like “meep-meep,” but Warner Bros. seems insistent on writing it as “beep-beep.” It’s also worth mentioning that the second Road Runner cartoon was called “Beep Beep.”