On May 28, while most fans were packing up their hard-won figures and prints to make the trip home from Celebration IV, a few hardcore collectors stayed back to battle it out for rare toys and other items pulled from Lucasfilm’s Licensing Archives — including a rare Kenner shipping carton that originally held four remote-controlled Jawa Sandcrawlers.

Now, while the Sandcrawlers themselves are quite valuable and among the most coveted of early Kenner Star Wars toys, what made this somewhat non-descript shipping carton so unique was who it was addressed to back in 1979: one George W. Lucas Jr. of San Anselmo, CA. Final price paid for the empty box: $950. All proceeds benefitted the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The following was actually part of the Ben Burtt panel highlights blog below, but we felt the subject of the famous Wilhelm scream deserved its own separate listing.

“The ‘Wilhelm’ was a scream that was in a western called Distant Drums,” says Burtt. “When I was growing up, I loved recording movies off television – just the audio – and I would listen to films at night in bed with headphones. I became very interested with how sound contributed to the success of a movie. And I began to notice that many sounds were used over and over in some movies – the same gunshot, the same thunderclap – it was kind of a language because each studio had its own collection. I just love recognizing familiar sounds and how they were used.

“And one of them was that scream,” continues Burtt, “because it had been used in half a dozen or more films like Charge at Feather River and Them and many westerns, Helen of Troy, and so on. So when I got to USC as a film student, another student named Richard Anderson and myself got a copy of the Wilhelm off a movie print and put it in our student film for fun and as kind of an homage. Then Richard and I both became sound editors after we left school, and I put [the Wilhelm] in Star Wars to kind of show off to him. And then he put one in Poltergeist — and so I put one in Raiders — and this went back and forth for 20 years and nobody noticed. George Lucas didn’t say anything, Steven Spielberg didn’t say anything. And then the internet came around and it suddenly came out into the open — so now, I guess, it’s become folk art.”

Ben Burtt hardly needs an introduction for most fans attending Star Wars Celebration, but just in case you’re one of the few who doesn’t wait through the end credits of a Star Wars movie, we’ll fill you in.

Ben Burtt is the legendary sound designer for all six Star Wars movies – creating such iconic sounds as Artoo’s characteristic beeps and whistles, Darth Vader’s menacing rasp, and Chewbacca’s unforgettable howl. And that’s just three from the thousands of sounds Burtt has created for the Star Wars movies as well as the Indiana Jones saga.

Host David Collins invited Burtt to his Celebration Theater today to discuss some of the legendary contributions the sound designer has made to the Star Wars saga. Fittingly, Burtt came dressed in his original Star Wars crew t-shirt from 1976. Here are some of the highlights:

Voicing Artoo

“Artoo was a difficult problem. In the original script, it didn’t really tell you what Artoo would say or how he would speak. With Artoo it had to be a sound which implied the information and had the emotional content but were not words as we know them. At first I made a lot of electronic sounds with a synthesizer keyboard, and the results seemed kind of sterile – Artoo didn’t to seem to have a soul. What ended up working was to combine the electronic element of the keyboard which gave a machine-like quality and then add to it the human performance which ended up being me since I was available. [Artoo’s voice] is not actually recorded in real time – I do it slower at a lower pitch and then speed everything up. But out of that process came the idea that you can shape a performance with the intonations of sounds, like a little baby or a toddler who hasn’t quite learned to talk but can communicate a great deal of feeling without actually knowing the words.”

Duke Garindan

“I always wanted to do an insect man – we didn’t really have an insect man come along until Poggle the Lesser [from Episodes II and III]. We had that character that looked kind of like a mosquito from the first Star Wars [Garindan] that we found we needed a sound for. And I was wondering back a few months ago how I did it – because I keep notes and tapes – and I discovered it was an electronic buzzing which had come off of my synthesizer that was triggered by a human voice. And I listened to it and realized it was John Wayne – I had found some loop lines in the trash from the studio that had been thrown away. So the buzzing was triggered by some dialog like ‘All right, what are you doin’ in this town’ or something like that.

Charge of the Clones

“We tried this experiment in Attack of the Clones where we had these sonic charges in space. We were fooling around with that in the mix, and at first it was a joke, but I thought I’d try having silence for about a second and then delay the sound to give it scale – like the lightning occurring before the thunder. It worked great and reminded me that if you want something to have impact, you’ve got to design for it.”

Accidental Shooting

“Most of the good sounds have been accidents. The guy-wire, which became the basis for all the stormtrooper laser guns, was an accident. I was hiking with my family on vacation and we were going over the top of a ridge in Pennsylvania in the Pocono Mountains under a radio tower with guy-wires. My pack caught on the wire and plucked it as we went by, making this great sound. So I went back to California and auditioned guy-wire towers all over until I found the one that gave the most interesting sound.”