I had the chance to correspond recently with Steven Gruskin, a professional TV and Sound Producer who is also a former Soundtrack Producer for Rankin Bass during the ThunderCats, SilverHawks and The Comic Strip era.
I asked him about what his job entailed during his time at R & B, and here is what he had to say:
I was hired by Rankin Bass to be the soundtrack producer for SilverHawks, but the two audio teams (ThunderCats and SilverHawks) worked closely together as the second season (65 eps) of TCats was produced as the same time as the first season of SilverHawks. We all also stayed on for The Comic Strip once Tcats and SHawks finished. I mostly finished SilverHawks episodes and Tony Giovanelli did more TCats but we did switch off a fair amount, especially for the recording sessions, and helped each other out a lot. We had a shared office and dub room and two production studios with mono, 2 track and 4 track tape machines, and we worked interchangeably. The soundtrack directors would receive the scripts from the writing dept (Peter Lawrence) and we would direct the talent for the recording sessions. The next step was to edit the voice recording. It was recorded onto two mono reel to reel tape machines (a master and safety). The soundtrack director (Matthew Malach, Tony G or me) would mark up the script with best takes and what we called action timings. So if there was a paragraph that explained a certain action, we would decide how many seconds to leave, and the editor would put timing leader of that length in. At the end of the first cut, we would listen down, look at the timings and make cuts or additions to get it to the correct program cut time. Once we were done we would send it to the office for approval, Lee Dannacher would sometimes send back notes (i.e. add 2 seconds here, take out this line) and then we would finish the cut.
We would also work with the voice actors to come up with voices for the secondary characters — especially during the second season when many new small part characters were introduced. One of the character designers, Jim Meskimen, ended up doing many of those voices and went on to have a great career as a voice over (and on-screen) actor.
Once the tape was cut and final, we would copy it onto one track of a 24 track tape that was striped with 60 cycle sync on trk 24. Remember, this was before SMPTE time code could be used to sync audio and video. A dub of the final voice and 60 cycle sync track would be made onto a special machine called a Nagra and that tape would go to the animators as the master for the show. They would transfer it to a film stripe and read that for mouth movements and animation timings.
While the animators were working on the picture, we would lay music onto the 24 track tape based on the action timings. We would usually use 3 stereo pairs to lay in the music and some sfx. The animators would spot the other sfx and those came back with the final picture. We would do a mix of the voice and music tracks, adding voice efx as necessary. Everything was done manually including “winging” in the music by starting the playback machines at exactly the right moment so the music would sync to the voices the way we wanted. When this process was done we would do a bounce mix onto 4 tracks of the 24 trk, — mono voice, 2 trk stereo music, and mono efx. This would get transferred to another tape on the Nagra along with the 60 cycle sync tone and get sent to the animators, as well as used for the final mix which married the picture and soundtrack. We would sometimes have to make changes to the music to adjust for the animation when the final picture came back.
One of us would supervise the final mix to picture, and then the program was mastered in California for broadcast.
The thing with animation, is that all of the life is in the soundtrack. Even though the picture gets the most attention, and stylistically will vary a lot, the heart and soul of a cartoon is in the soundtrack. If the track is bad the cartoon will suck no matter how great the animation is. The audio team on ThunderCats was top notch, and you can hear it in the shows. I’m really proud to have been part of that group and I’m still in touch with several of the people I worked with on those series.
And that’s what we did in the audio studio. There were two production teams of a producer and engineer (engineers were Larry Franke and Michael Ungar), an assistant (the unforgettable John Crenshaw) and an assistant. It was a great time. We had a lot of the toys in the studio and it was a very fun environment. The cast was great and the recording sessions were a lot of fun.
