GIVING ELMO THE GIGGLES : CONTAGIOUS LAUGH TOOK HOURS OF WORK.Byline: Eve Mitchell The San Francisco Examiner The San Francisco Examiner is a U.S. daily newspaper. It has been published continuously in San Francisco, California, since the late 19th Century. History 19th century The beginning of the Examiner is a topic of some controversy. When Tickle Me Elmo Tickle Me Elmo is a childrens' toy from Tyco, introduced in the United States in 1996, becoming that year's top fad. Bright red in color and based on Elmo, a Muppet character from Sesame Street, when squeezed, Elmo would chortle. laughs its escalating gleeful glee·ful adj. Full of jubilant delight; joyful. glee  ful·ly adv.glee giggle, two guys from the Peninsula have a special reason to smile. Mark Johnson-Williams and Benito Cortez helped to bring about that laugh, which launched one of this year's hottest-selling Christmas toys. Johnson-Williams, 40, a toy consultant from Half Moon Bay, assisted in transforming the concept for the plush doll's giggles into reality by melding tape-recorded laughs and computer-chip technology. ``Elmo is a fun character, and this kind of really captured the essence of what makes it fun. Laughing is kind of contagious. When somebody's laughing so hard that they're shaking, it's fun to be in that room,'' said Johnson-Williams. Cortez, a 31-year-old sound designer at Music Annex Studios in Menlo Park Menlo Park. 1 Residential city (1990 pop. 28,040), San Mateo co., W Calif.; inc. 1874. Electronic equipment and aerospace products are manufactured in the city. Menlo College and a Stanford Univ. research institute are there. 2 Uninc. , worked with Johnson-Williams to edit and transform the laugh tape into a computerized sound file that made mass production of the chip possible. ``When I listened to the original laugh and was studying it, I couldn't help but laugh myself,'' said Cortez. Based on the Sesame Street Sesame Street is an American educational children's television series for preschoolers and is a pioneer of the contemporary educational television standard, combining both education and entertainment. character of the same name, the crimson-color, 14-inch-high doll laughs harder and harder when its belly is pushed. By the third touch, the doll is laughing hysterically and shaking. Cortez sensed that the toy was going to be big after he gave a Tickle Me Elmo to his 1-year-old nephew in August, a month after the doll first hit store shelves. ``When I saw his reaction, I knew this was going to be a popular toy,'' he said. A former electrical engineer, Cortez began working at Music Annex Studios in 1995. The company operates a full-service recording studio in Menlo Park and does post-production audio work for video products in San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden . ``When I took this job, I knew it was going to be fun,'' said Cortez. Working on Elmo turned out to be ``a combination of listening and engineering and producing something that makes kids laugh,'' he said. Johnson-Williams left a job in the aerospace industry in 1979 to begin working with chip-based toys and now works as a consultant for several toy companies. He began working on Tickle Me Tickle Me is a 1965 western comedy-musical starring Elvis Presley. Primary cast
Mantua Metal Products was a Woodbury Heights, New Jersey, metalworks business founded in 1926 by John Tyler and family. Inc. of Mount Laurel, N.J. Tickle Me Elmo is manufactured in China. Initially, 400,000 of the dolls had been ordered. Tyco hiked up year-end production to a million to keep up with holiday consumer demand, said Janice Yates, assistant vice president for marketing at the company's New York-based preschool division. Tyco's preschool division, which has made other versions of Elmo, recently was awarded the licensing rights by Children's Television Workshop Children's Television Workshop: see Cooney, Joan Ganz. to manufacture plush toys based on Sesame Street characters The following is a list of recurring Muppet, animated, and human characters on Sesame Street. 0–9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A Picture Character Actor/Muppeteer Description Abby Cadabby Leslie Carrara , said Yates. ``Elmo is a very loving, furry monster that has the personality of a 3-year-old. He's very innocent and interested in discovering the world. He gets into trouble now and again,'' said Yates, describing the personality of Sesame Street's Elmo character, which first appeared on television in 1985. She said two inventors first approached the company about the idea of a laughing doll. ``We married that with the Elmo character. We felt it was a perfect match,'' said Yates, adding that Tyco toy designers decided that Elmo also should shake on the third laugh. In all, the three sets of laughter last less than 30 seconds, said Yates. Getting just the right mix of laughs, chuckles and giggles for that brief time took hours and hours and is where the sound smarts of Johnson-Williams and Cortez came in. The effort first involved getting the actual voice of Elmo - Sesame Street cast member Kevin Clash Kevin Clash (born September 17, 1960) is an accomplished puppeteer whose characters include Elmo, Clifford, Splinter, and Hoots the Owl. He currently serves as Sesame Street Muppet Captain and co-executive producer. - to record a whole bunch of ``hee-hee-hee, ho and ha'' sounds at a New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of recording studio. Several phrases were recorded at the session, which also had representatives from Tyco and Sesame Street on hand, but only the ``Oh, boy . . . that tickles'' ended up getting used in the final version of Tickle Me Elmo. Back at the Music Annex Studios in Menlo Park, Johnson-Williams and Cortez then transferred and manipulated a digital cassette of the recording into a computerized sound file that was edited. ``We scoured the tape back and forth to find the hees, the has and the hos, to recombine re·com·bine v. To undergo or cause genetic recombination; form new combinations. them in all these different ways to not make it sound like a tape-machine repeating over and over and over,'' said Williams-Johnson. ``It's always got to sound like Elmo and preserve the quality of the voice,'' said Cortez. ``The biggest thing is the laugh. It's actually scripted from a bunch of little laugh chunks.'' An audio prototype of the finished laugh track was sent back to officials at Tyco and Sesame Street for approval. Once the go-ahead was given, Johnson-Williams transformed the laugh track into coded computer language that was sent over a modem to a Taiwanese computer chip manufacturer. ``It's all worth it when you see kids playing with your toy,'' he said. Johnson-Williams said that while he was working on the doll, he showed an Elmo prototype to some friends of his in Half Moon Bay to get their reaction. ``I take it to my harshest critics to see what their comments are,'' he said. ``You can't help but smile.'' CAPTION(S): Photo Photo: (Color) Mark Johnson-Williams hugs a handful of Tickle Me Elmos, which he helped design the sound module for. Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. |
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