Godzilla

In the 1954 original Godzilla, the monster’s iconic roar was created by rubbing leather gloves on the strings of a musical instrument. The sound effects team tried, unsuccessfully, to use animal sounds to create the roar. Then it was Japanese composer Akira Ifukube who had the idea to use a musical instrument to create the shriek we all know.

“It was actually a double bass, using a leather glove coated in pine-tar resin to create friction,” Aadahl says. “They’d rub it against the string of the double bass to create that sound.”

The sound effects team played a lot with anything that created friction — experimenting with the sounds of rusty car doors and rubbing the surface of a tom drum.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Forty squirrels were trained to crack nuts for the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, because the director Tim Burton refused to take any short cuts and said scenes had to be as life-like as possible. The squirrels were used for 10 months, which for them meant cracking and sorting nuts on a conveyor belt.

Despicable Me

Minionese, the language of the Minions in the Despicable Me movies, is not a real-world language — rather it is a borrowed one from existing languages that have been mashed up together to create the gibberish that these cute, lovable creatures speak.

The film’s two directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, reportedly created the language all by themselves. In fact, the two of them even recorded some of the ‘Minionese’ on their own, to avoid having to teach all of the voice actors the fabricated language.

Similar to Spanglish or Swiss-German, the Minions actually use a combination of dialects when they speak — it is made up of Minionese, in addition to English, Spanish, French, Filipino and also, a little bit of Italian. The Minions also often tend to throw random food vocabulary into their language, including: banana, poulet (which means ‘chicken’ in French), and tikka masala.

Published in Dawn, Young World, September 18th, 2021