When Tickle Me Elmo laughs its escalating gleeful giggle, two local guys 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, Calif., helped transform 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-Wil-liams.
Cortez, a 31-year-old sound designer at Music Annex Studios in Menlo Park, Calif., worked with Johnson-Williams to edit and transform the laugh tape into a computerized sound file that made mass production possible.
Based on the Sesame Street character of the same name, the crimson-colored, 14-inch-high doll laughs harder and harder when its belly is pushed.
Cortez began working on Tickle Me Elmo's sound component 14 months ago on a contract basis with the doll's manufacturer, the preschool division of Tyco Toys 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, was recently awarded the licensing rights by Children's Television Workshop to manufacture plush toys based on Sesame Street characters, said Yates.
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 should also shake on the third laugh.
Getting just the right mix of laughs, chuckles and giggles (which last less than 30 seconds) 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 - to record a whole bunch of "hee-hee-hee, ho and ha" sounds at a New York 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.
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.
"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."