Behind the Tunes: Crash! Bang! Boom! - The Wild Sounds of Treg Brown

Historians, critics and just plain fans of the old Looney Tunes cartoons always speak with great respect regarding Treg Brown and his great work as a sound-effects editor.

Brown, it turns out, was a very interesting guy, a man with a great sense of humor and was a terrific musician. Music was really his passion but a traveling musician playing nightclubs wasn't financially a good movie during The Depression. He wound up working at Paramount under Cecil B. DeMille, doing sound-effects in some big films such as "Cleopatra" and "Sign Of The Cross."

With that background, he was able to bring those kind of realistic feature-length sound effects to the cartoons when he began working for Warner Brothers. How he incorporated realistic sounds into the fantasy cartoons was very interesting. Brown was real innovator in the cartoon business. This documentary continues with more interesting tidbits about this man and evolution of this craft of sound-effects. I found it not just informative but entertaining to learn about this topic. I was amazed at all the sounds that were made - and how - in the Road Runner cartoons.

This documentary can be seen as part of the "features" on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Two, Disc 2 DVD.

I should start by saying that there appear to be two documentaries that share nearly the exact same title(the only part that differs is the "The Wild Sounds..." part)... the one I'm reviewing is not about Treg Brown, or the classic shorts, but the 2003 film Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is also the DVD it appears on, it's 7 and a half minutes long(not 11), and the credited cast here on IMDb are largely not in it.

Anyway, it consists of behind-the-scenes footage, clips of the movie, and interviews with the crew. Like the other featurette and the deleted scenes, this is narrated by Bugs and Daffy, and meant for children. Anyone not a fan of the characters might find it obnoxious. The focus is on the visual FX, and whether they were done in the computer, using hand-drawn animation or practically(models, stunts, etc.).

While no new ground is really covered(to be fair, that's to be expected for when this came out), things are explained well enough(albeit you always have to filter out the irritating nonsense the duck is incessantly spouting).

I recommend this to anyone who wants to see how they accomplished the various... stuff that didn't really happen -certainly, this is a good place to start for kids who want to know about the subject. 7/10

While I had seen countless Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons over the years, I had never known about Tregoweth Edmond Brown until I saw "Behind the Tunes: Crash! Bang! Boom! - The Wild Sounds of Treg Brown". It's always really impressive to learn about the various people who worked on these classic cartoons, and specifically about how Brown created all those noises. It just goes to show what a collective endeavor goes into film-making, whether live action or animated. I would say that Brown deserves more recognition than he has received throughout history. Pretty neat.

PS: in "One Froggy Evening", the slab at the beginning says something like Tregoweth Brown Inc.

This 11 minute short featurette can be located on Disc two of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 (next to the episode "Zipping Along"). It features interviews with various notable people on the sadly unsung great sound effects work of Treg Brown. I'm sad to admit that I really didn't know who this guy was before I saw this short documentary. But now I know that he was a very instrumental force in making Looney Tunes shorts as great as they truly were. It also let me know how the sound was made for some of my favorite gags. Such as the Road Runner smacking his lips, his Wang guiter work, and others.

My Grade: A