The opera singer Lloyd Thomas Leech said his yodel was recorded for the yell. Other stories emerged over time, many of them breathlessly cataloged by ERB Zine, a website devoted to Tarzan’s creator. Weismuller’s yodel alone left something missing, he said, so the studio mixed in that cacophony of notes and played them at varying speeds, all in the attempt to give the shout “a more jungle-piercing, elephant-spooking, and blood-curdling effect.” All of them “fibs,” Taliaferro writes.īut Tom Held, a former MGM sound engineer, stood by this version of events. As MGM tells it, sound engineers created the battle cry by blending the actor’s voice with a “hyena’s howl played backward, a camel’s bleat, the pluck of a violin, and a soprano’s high C.” Other versions of the claim replace the hyena’s howl with a dog’s growl.
The studio told another story, concocted, according to Burroughs’s biographer John Taliaferro, after it realized the majesty of Weissmuller’s song. The actor said when he read Tarzan books as a kid, he always imagined the yell sounding like a yodel, perhaps because he regularly belted out undulating falsettos of his own at German picnics in Chicago. Then in 1932, former Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller came along in Tarzan the Ape Man and produced the battle cry we now know so well.