Personalized voice recordings by Elwood "You've got mail!" Edwards (2024)
34 comments
·January 14, 2025dhosek
choult
Mine was the clip from Holy Grail where Eric Idle is hit by an arrow - "Message for you sir"
https://movie-sounds.org/comedy-movie-sounds/quotes-with-sou...
yladiz
I wonder how many recordings he did. I hope that more people come out of the woodwork and share the recordings they bought from him, like in this case, especially if there are some slightly silly ones (like "Use the source, Luke!").
Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
HeatrayEnjoyer
> Aside: I was so worried it was going to be an AI voice generator based on his voice. I sadly think it's inevitable but I can hope he didn't make enough recordings to be able to reliably synthesize his voice.
I have bad news about the state of voice cloning...
digitallis42
There was an entire skit series, numerous videos and interviews... Just about the only confounder is that he used many voices and accents.
echoangle
Maybe I missed it but the article doesn't seem to contain the original sound. Here's a YouTube upload of it:
roskelld
AOL Desktop is still a thing in 2025 and was updated as recently as a few days ago.
Michael MJD just did a video on it. Still contains Elwood's classic soundbites, along with some snazzy images of current pop stars like Avril Lavigne.
jbaber
I was pretty sympathetic to the idea that this must be AOL taking care of customers continuously for decades until that quick mention that you start by downloading a .exe over plain http.
mnky9800n
This always reminds me of the mst3k quip, "You've got male pattern baldness!"
MisterTea
Time Chasers is a classic. Mike's sarcastic "looks guys the count down on the com-pew-terrr" always cracks me up.
mnky9800n
It’s probably the best episode. That and over drawn a the memory bank. Overdrawn is my favourite episode by far. I love Raul Julia is wonderful and the cast really makes it a movie worth watching without mst3k. It presents such a weird view of future life. It’s as if it’s made by an alien that doesn’t really understand human culture and experiences. Like how has being “Doppled” into animals actually become the de facto treatment for scrolling up cinemas at work? Why are movies banned? If a person did actually have some blank Brain because of doppling why was that news to the woman whose job it is to dopple? Why is there an evil ceo of a mega corporation trying to control his mind? And are we really to believe that because Finkle can figure out how to scroll up cinemas he can hack the Gibson? The movie just generates questions after questions. Like why is the CEO mad about this? Did they just discover a way to put a persons mind in a computer and allow them to create any reality they want? Why is this a bad thing? It sounds like it would print money forever. Why does no one realise this and everyone conspire against Finkle? Which side is Apolonia on? She works for the mega corporations but her colleague who is getting fat on flavofibes is secretly reporting Apolonias decisions to the ceo.
Like tbh I think the movie is some kind of creative genius. Because it also has a crazy aesthetic. This weird vhs aesthetic that also has this kind of vision of the future where everyone is forced to wear grey suits in some sort of Orwellian capitalist nightmare. But everything is shot like it’s a two camera television studio setup. Interspersed with on location shots. So the studio has this weird soft lighting and the location shots all look like they are natural light.
The only thing I can compare it to is Twelve Monkeys. Yes I just equated Overdrawn at the Memory Bank to Twelve Monkeys. But I love this movie and I feel like everyone gives honest performances and it creates something totally unique. The world that exists inside of Overdrawn at the Memory Bank exists no place else.
MisterTea
Overdrawn was the first MST3K episode I saw. I was randomly flipping cable channels and saw this silhouette of some characters watching a movie with this fat guy barking orders and decided to watch. Within minutes I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I was instantly hooked.
I downloaded a torrent long ago (missing the KTMA episodes) so I have nearly all of them. During the pandemic lock-down Joel/Mike, the bots and the mads kept me company. When a close friend was deployed in Iraq in the 00's I would burn episodes to DVD and send them to him in his mothers care packages and he had the whole platoon watching and laughing. There are so many good episodes but Time Chasers, Overdrawn, Space Mutiny, Death Stalker, Bride of the Monster, and Devil fish are my favorites.
jansan
Wait a minute, 22 years ago his wife worked for what? "Quantum Computer Services"???
jgrahamc
Quantum was one of those words that sounded really cool (back then). Just look at TV shows like Quantum Leap (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap_(2022_TV_series)) or Sinclair's QL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL)
ajb
Amusingly this is true of an older discovery that now seems very commonplace: vibration, around the time that scientists understood the simple harmonic oscillator, and the fact that the same mathematics applies to lots of things from sounds to pendulums. So to make their nonsense sound sciencey, spiritualists started talking about vibrations as well.
Not sure if there are any older examples.
inanutshellus
Great analogy. They'd be using "Quantum" the same way one might've also used, say, "Turing Computer Services". THey want the legitimacy of sounding elite and beyond-the-cutting-edge while presumably being expert at merely replacing bad RAM and defragging harddisks.
Early 2000's version was simply putting ".com" or ".net" in your company name so you sounded enticing to investors, or when everyone added "crypto" and to their company names.
Of similar vein I expect current generation "Artificial Intelligence" will likely be renamed and thought of as quaint or audacious, like the renaming of "Modern" furniture aesthetic to "Mid-Century Modern".
addaon
> Not sure if there are any older examples.
Humorous story about that…
emchammer
Tabulate. Love it.
the_jeremy
Not the same company, but similar: I have some old T-shirts advertising tape drives from Quantum when my dad worked for them in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Corporation
They were a tape drive and hard drive manufacturer. I guess they still have the tape drive section, but they sold their HDD division to ... Maxtor, which then got bought out by Seagate, I think?
dang
Recent and related:
Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL's 'you've got mail' alert, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42087087 - Nov 2024 (41 comments)
with additional comments by jgrahamc, starting here:
jgrahamc
Thanks, dang! It was that HN post and comments that got me to make the effort to find the old emails and recordings and post this.
globalise83
Very enterprising on his part, and a nice reminder of the culture of the early-ish web.
axus
Somehow he wasn't acquired by private equity and given a legal department to negotiate annual payments for licenses to use the .wav files
cjrp
That's cool, Cameo before it existed.
Moosturm
Those are the things I like about John GC: still having fun with the small things in life.
jgrahamc
Life is far to short to take it seriously all the time.
beng-nl
[flagged]
I used to have somewhere an audio file of Andy Richter (from Late Night with Conan O’Brien—and other projects, but this was during the Late Night era) saying, “Well, you’ve got mail, but it’s probably crap” that I used as my alert sound for mail. I kind of miss that.