You have heard the same man die thousands of times, across decades and galaxies, and he recorded those agonized moments over 70 years ago. This episode is the audio biography of the Wilhelm scream, from a 1951 recording session for the Florida Everglades film Distant Drums, labeled Man Getting Bit by an Alligator and He Screams, through six takes, the famous take four, and the anonymous decades it spent in a Warner Bros. stock library filed under screams and falls.

We follow the archival detective work in the editor's logs that pointed to Sheb Wooley, the Rawhide actor who also had a six-week number-one hit with The Purple People Eater, and the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River whose Private Wilhelm gave the sound its name. Then Ben Burtt's rediscovery of the scream for a 1977 space opera and the Indiana Jones films, its spread as a  ...