Jacked-up soundtrack
It's a shame this is one classic whose soundtrack has been jacked-up to over-the-top sound levels. It's now a very noisy film. Those slaps now sound like 2 x 4's being whacked together. A real shame.
shareYes, I have always suspected that they were worried that this was going to seem like some dull little filmed play, and so the looping and the sound effects were made absurdly loud, so sort of "up" the hysteria.
"You must sing him your prettiest songs, then perhaps he will want to marry you."
DryToast this is not the way the film was originally done/presented. Somewhere around the time between VHS and DVD the soundtrack was redone, and this is a travesty that has hit many older films, and the sound level was boosted to the overload point. "The Miracle Worker" is one of the most glaring examples of how a film's impact is lessen considerably, if not totally destroyed by this practice.
shareI am referring to things that have always been disproportionately loud and predate the home video era. For instance, the looping in the "ladder rescue" sequence has always seemed absurdly loud, as if the actors were just shouting into the microphones in post-sync, and the results were mixed with no regard to where the characters are spatially in the frame. The sound in this film has always been a little grating, harsh and ugly, as in many medium-to-low-budget films of that era.
So I am curious about what you mean by "redone." Do you mean the sound effects have been re-recorded? Or the entire track has been made louder to the point of distortion so that it's not solvable by merely turning your volume down? Or are you suggesting that they took the soundtrack and amplified isolated things like slaps?
"You must sing him your prettiest songs, then perhaps he will want to marry you."
The entire soundtrack has been made louder to the point of distortion. The same thing is happening with reissued CDs, they're compressing the sound and making them play LOUDER, destroying all the harmonics--it's called "The Loudness Wars" (be wary of the word "remastered"). There's a ton of older films that have been tampered with some time ago now making them almost painful to listen to. Old music scores now have screeching violins because of this method. The Miracle Worker actually had a "quiet" soundtrack, that now sounds bombastic and overbearing and because of this the film's impact has been reduced.
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