Thursday, December 03, 2009

December with the Doctor: Vwhat?

So, in my recent flurry of watching, listening to, and otherwise absorbing all things Whovian, I've purchased a couple of Doctor Who Magazines and I've finally gone back and read the first two IDW miniseries. The quality of the comics therein has been pretty mediocre1 (though I also got the collection of Grant Morrison stories, so that ought to raise my impressions a bit), but something has really stuck out to me: the TARDIS materialization sound. The onomatopoeia is typically rendered as "Vworp vworp" or "vwaarp vwaarp." Now, I'm all for distinctive sound effects--"snikt," "thwip," "bamf," etc.--but I'm also a little peeved when such sound effects are discarded (see: almost any time any of those has been rendered in film. I mean, is it really that hard to have Wolverine's claws make a metal-sliding-against-metal sound like "snikt"?).

So it's interesting to see the dissonance go in the opposite direction, from film to text. See, here's the TARDIS dematerialization sound:



I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly don't here anything in there that sounds like "vworp." It's certainly a difficult sound to render into text, but listening to it several times, I can't imagine translating it without some e's and probably a ch. "Vreeench" doesn't quite do it...maybe "vreeunnnnch."

But "vworp"?



1. This is, of course, excluding The Ten Doctors, which rocks my socks. I'm enjoying The Stalker of Norfolk too.

1 comment:

Anthony Strand said...

I had no idea that a comic called "The Ten Doctors" existed. I'm going to have to go ahead and read it right now.

But I have finals to do! Curse you, Foss!