Burtt is glad to sound off on speaking for WALL"E'

The name Ben Burtt might not "sound" familiar, but how 'bout his sounds?

Certainly you'd recognize all those bells and whistles and wonderful noises that became the iconic R2D2 and the heavy breathing Darth Vader in the "Star Wars" movies or, most recently, the voice of the funny little title character in "WALL"E."

With the latter due for Tuesday release on Blu-ray high-def and DVD, Burtt was a gold mine of information during a recent conversation.

"WALL"E" alone features an impressively huge 2,600 sound files, including the clinks and clatter Burtt and his 11-year-old daughter made by banging around shopping carts in a suburban parking lot for one sequence.

"Way back in 1964," explained the 60-year-old Burtt, who has been saving recordings since the age of 10, "I recorded my grandfather's short-wave radio. Just from tuning all around with transmissions of this and that, I was able to recycle saved pieces of it in WALL"E' and "Star Wars.'

"Sounds always can be valuable for history and re-usage," Burtt continued. "After all, you're working with illusions in movies, and sound is one of the ways to convince people that something might be real.

"I remember working on Munich' and needing a lot of the sounds that I recorded in college in 1970, like airplanes and typewriters and telephones. I've always thought that, if you used sounds from the real world -- even something you can't identify -- it brings with it some of that credibility and naturalness."

Because "WALL"E" director/co-writer Andrew Stanton thinks Burtt creates his own credibility, he called the sound man's contributions "crucial."

"If we didn't get Ben, ("WALL"E") either would have failed miserably, or I would have backed out altogether," Stanton said. "When we came up with conceit of the movie 14 years ago, we said it would be like R2D2, the Movie.'...