Creators Tickled Pink By Elmo's Laugh

SAN FRANCISCO - When Tickle Me Elmo laughs its escalating gleeful giggle, two guys from the Bay Area 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, assisted in transforming the concept for the plush doll's giggles into reality by melding tape-recorded laughs and computer-chip technology.

Cortez, a 31-year-old sound designer at Music Annex Studios in Menlo Park, worked with Johnson-Williams to edit and transform the laugh tape into a computerized sound file that made mass production of the chip 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. By the third touch, the doll is laughing hysterically and shaking.

Cortez sensed that the toy was going to be big after he gave a Tickle Me Elmo to his 1-year-old nephew in August, a month after the doll first hit store shelves. "When I saw his reaction, I knew this was going to be a popular toy," he said.

A former electrical engineer, Cortez began working at Music Annex Studios in 1995. The company operates a full-service recording studio in Menlo Park and does post-production audio work for video products in San Francisco.

"When I took this job, I knew it was going to be fun," said Cortez.

Working on Elmo turned out to be "a combination of listening and engineering and producing something that makes kids laugh," he said.

Johnson-Williams left a job in the aerospace industry in 1979 to begin working with chip-based toys and now works as a consultant for several toy companies.

He 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 of Mount Laurel, N.J.

Tickle Me Elmo is manufactured in China. Initially, 400,000 of the dolls had been ordered. Tyco increased year-end production to a million to keep up with holiday consumer demand, said Janice Yates, assistant vice president for marketing at Tyco's preschool division.

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.

In all, Elmo's three sets of laughter last less than 30 seconds.

Getting just the right mix of laughs, chuckles and giggles for that brief time took 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 of Tickle Me Elmo.

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.

"We scoured the tape back and forth to find the hee's, the ha's and the ho's, to recombine them in all these different ways to not make it sound like a tape-machine repeating over and over and over," said Williams-Johnson.

"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."

An audio prototype of the finished laugh track was sent back to officials at Tyco and Sesame Street for approval. Once the go-ahead was given, Johnson-Williams transformed the laugh track into coded computer language that was sent over a modem to a Taiwanese computer-chip manufacturer.

"It's all worth it when you see kids playing with your toy," Cortez said.

Johnson-Williams said that while he was working on the doll, he showed an Elmo prototype to some friends of his in Half Moon Bay to get their reaction.

"I take it to my harshest critics to see what their comments are," he said. "You can't help but smile."