There is a movie star you’ve never heard of, but whom you’ve almost certainly heard. She’s in Toy Story and Babe, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Home Alone 3. You can catch her in Les Misérables. And if you’re a fan of being frightened, she’s also in End of Days and Pet Sematary. Once you’re familiar with her work, you start to hear her everywhere. Picture the scene: a frustrated character flings something, possibly a boot, off-camera. Perhaps we hear a bin lid clattering to the ground, and then it comes: the sound of a shocked cat screeching ferociously.
You may have heard of the Wilhelm Scream. In the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River, a character named Private Wilhelm loudly yelled “Argh!” after being shot in the thigh with an arrow. This yell subsequently became an overused sound effect, appearing in Star Wars and Indiana Jones among many, many other films. Hollywood is full of similar stock noises – spooky birds, ominous thunderclaps and generic telephone rings. The one I’m talking about could perhaps be christened the “Wilhelm Miaow”.
“How come no one ever talks/complains about THAT same cat sounds that gets used in ALL movies?” asks a Reddit post from 2017. A page on the online plot convention catalogue TVTropes.org is entitled That Poor Cat: “Every time a vehicle crashes, trash cans fall over, something blows up, or any chaos occurs off-screen … we hear some poor cat yowl, in pain or perhaps just startled.” The page claims that the most used screeching cat in cinema originates from a 20-CD sound effects library released in 1990, The Premiere Edition, by a company called the Hollywood Edge. The audio clip in question lasts 23 seconds and has the uncatchy filename “CatsTwoAngryYowlsD PE022601”.
Who exactly is the feline vocalist in this recording, and who was the person who pressed record? For years, debate has raged on a community-created specialist encyclopaedia known as the Sound Effects Wiki. One person theorised that the cat is actually US voice actor Frank Welker, who has voiced Scooby Doo, Garfield and the Simpsons’ cat Snowball II, and demonstrated an uncanny ability to mimic the sound of a catfight. Another wondered whether it could be traced to Thomas J Valentino, one of the fathers of sound effects libraries in the 1930s.
However. “That miaow was recorded in my living room,” says Wylie Stateman, a 66-year-old, LA-based sound designer who created the Hollywood Edge sound effects library in 1988. “It was my first foray into having cats, and one of them, a female kitten, was starting to go into heat.” Described by Stateman as “a remarkable small female with a confident voice and racy physique”, the cat was an all-black, part-Siamese named Cheeta. Her companion in the room was a male called Sylvester. “That’s just what happens when you put cats together and they air out their complaints,” Stateman says. “It’s pure attitude. Cheeta was just laying down a performance.”
“Wylie was one of the great recordists of the time. He recorded more than most anybody,” says his colleague Lou Bender, who would go on to create Netflix’s familiar “ta-dum” intro. Stateman says that for 20 years he carried a tape recorder with him almost everywhere: “Never went on a vacation without one.” Users on the Sound Effects Wiki have now collated 330 examples of the Wilhelm Miaow’s use, from 101 Dalmatians in 1996 to Venom: Let There Be Carnage in 2021. But are all of these examples really Cheeta?
Wiki users claim that one of the first uses of the Wilhelm Miaow was in Tim Burton’s animated 1982 short Vincent. Yet Stateman is confident that’s not Cheeta – he didn’t record her until the late 80s.
I approach Tim Brookes, a senior lecturer in audio at the Institute of Sound Recording at the University of Surrey. Brookes turns Cheeta’s yowl and the yowl in Vincent into spectrograms – graphs that allow us to visualise sounds – and after looking at the harmonic structures and pitch contours of both clips, he concludes with confidence: “The two sounds are not the same, and no section of either is the same as any section of the other.”
To the untrained ear, however, the two do sound similar. I ask Brookes to compare the Hollywood Edge sound with the feline screech in Toy Story, and he reveals that they might not be the same either. One of the contours on the Toy Story spectrogram is less steep than the corresponding contour in Cheeta’s spectrogram. “With any comparison of this nature, it’s almost impossible to say for sure,” Brookes says, because sound effects are mixed together with lots of other audio in movies, and they are also often edited, sped up, slowed down or modulated in pitch. “Any of those processes could make the final sound appear quite different from its original source, or could make it appear very similar to another sound that wasn’t its original source.”
Cheeta was definitely in the 1989 adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Brookes confirms it with another spectrogram. But short of making spectrograms for all 330 alleged uses of the sound effect, it’s difficult to say just how prolific Cheeta’s yowls are. Could the screeches in Babe and Les Misérables be the work of a different feline thespian? Might there be three or even four cat yowls that are favoured by sound editors? In which case, there isn’t actually a Wilhelm Miaow at all.
Figuring all that out is probably a job for a PhD student or an enthusiastic YouTuber – and either way, Cheeta was a movie star. Who are the other cool cats that yowled their way to stardom alongside her? It may be impossible ever to know. “Sound gets separated from the source,” says Stateman – and back in the 80s, “there was no real way to attach the source metadata to the recording”.
This confusion is evident on the internet. As Stateman has never shared Cheeta’s story online, Wiki users currently believe that the late sound editor John Leveque recorded the Hollywood Edge yowls – that rumour came from 55-year-old, LA-based supervising sound editor Rob Nokes, who bought a number of audio library assets in 2004 and 2014. In the logbooks he acquired of Leveque’s sound library, Nokes found reference to a reel of “cats fighting – yowls” and passed it on to a Sound Effects Wiki editor, but there was no information in the logbooks about who actually recorded the sound. “I would side with Wylie’s recollection and leave it at that,” he says.
Nokes describes the recording industry in the 1980s as “the wild west”; Stateman says the origins of some sounds are “murky”. “At that time we were just frantically trying to record things,” he says. “In the future, I hope we will see a day when metadata is embedded in every recording, and we will know more about the equipment used, the artists involved.”
Still, if it turns out that there is a cat out there who is a greater star than Cheeta, it’s no skin off Stateman’s nose – he is not proudest of “a single sound effect” but instead of the overall mark The Hollywood Edge made. “We published tens of thousands of sound effects, and this really began a worldwide thirst for doing creative sound recording, field recording,” he says. He also believes that sounds become iconic because of how they’re used, not how they’re created. “The art is in the placement and not the origin,” he says. “It’s the places that sound designers put these things: it’s comedy, it’s tragedy, it’s art.”
Stateman is perhaps also a tiny bit bemused by my keen interest in a single, 23-second cat recording. “For me, having a learning disorder at a very young age, I learned to listen to the world. Audio is such a natural experience that I don’t treasure the specifics of it sometimes,” he says. “I listen all the time, I record all the time.”
Cheeta lived to the age of 10. In his life, John Wayne acted in more than 150 movies, while Christopher Lee totalled over 200. Might a moody little black kitten have been almost as prolific as the pair of them combined?
