Friday, May 18, 2012

So Lou Ferrigno Was in ‘The Avengers’…


From screencrush, Marvel legend Stan Lee has a cameo at the end but otherwise, ‘The Avengers’ is very light on Easter eggs. Except when it comes to a very well-disguised cameo from a former Hulk…

As it turns out, when it came to creating the Hulk’s roar for ‘The Avengers’ sound designer Christopher Boyes went back to an old friend to help get just the right sound.

IGN has posted a new video interview from Sound Works Collection with Boyes, who served as Sound Designer, Supervising Sound Editor and Re-recording Mixer on the film. At around the 3:15 mark, he begins to explain how he arrived at the sound of the new Hulk. His mandate from director Joss Whedon was to make the Green Goliath sound less monster-like and more “superhuman” or even “human in rage.”

Boyes relates how he came up with about 15 different samples, of which Whedon picked the one he liked best. And that one, Boyes reveals, was a mix of his own voice, that of Mark Ruffalo (who plays Dr. Bruce Banner), two New Zealand actors…and Lou Ferrigno.

Yes, the first (and so far, only) actual human actor to get painted green and play the Hulk in the classic late ’70s TV series — who also, by the way, lent his voice to the character for 2008′s ‘The Incredible Hulk’ film — has contributed to the iconic role again, in perhaps his best incarnation yet.

2 comments:

Johnny Sweatpants said...

That picture is awesome as is The Hulk TV show from the 70's.

Mark Ruffalo seemingly modeled his portrayal of David Banner after Bill Bixby in the Avengers (and he looks kinda like him too!)

Jordan said...

I do not actually agree that the show is awesome, for the basic reason that having a guy painted green as the Hulk is just hopelessly inadequate.

I'm beginning to think that pre-CGI moviemaking is akin to silent film; you've just got this huge core problem of what you can't show. My favorite example is contrasting The Wizard of Oz (the movie) with The Lord of the Rings (the movie). Both books were published at roughly the same time and both are pitched at the same degree of fantasy. In The Wizard of Oz (the book), the cowardly lion is a lion -- he's actually a real lion. He's not a man standing there in basically a kid's Halloween costume with an oval hole cut out for his face. L. Frank Baum really got screwed compared to Tolkien, because with Tolkien they didn't even try (except badly, with animation, in the 'Seventies) until CGI made it possible to actually show Gollum, Treebeard, Rivendell, Minas Tirith, Mount Doom, etc. Compare movie Minas Tirith to movie Emerald City: on the printed page they're pretty similar, but in the movies they couldn't be more different (the Emerald City is just a single painted backdrop).

So it's the same think with the Hulk. I mean, it took them three tries but they finally got to the level of the drawings in the comic books (just like it took until 2000 to get to the level of Tolkien's descriptions). That's just the way it is.

Malevolent

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