Important research: was the Eudora “New Mail” chime from Ren & Stimpy’s “LOG”?

Inspired (obliquely) by this Metafilter post, I set out to answer a burning question.

LOG chime

This occurs from second 36 to second 38 of this video:

The chime when extracted without further processing, sounds like this:

(direct link: Original-Log-Commercial_The-Ren-and-Stimpy-Show.wav)

Eudora chime

I found a copy of Eudora Mail 1.44 for Windows (bundled up in an archive quaintly called “internet.zip”) here. The EUDOR144.EXE file is itself a Zip archive, and contains several files. The important one is WEUDORA.EXE (722,944 bytes; SHA256 checksum a35f2ef1e95242228381d9340fff0995f4935223f88a38b9200717107252dfb9).

This is a Windows 16 “New Executable” (NE) file, and I used panzi/mediaextract to scan and extract the RIFF/WAV data:

(direct link: WEUDORA.EXE_000a8200.wav)

They sure sound similar. But are they … the same?

Comparison

I made sure that both samples were set to the same rate, and I applied simple amplification in Audacity so that they both had a peak volume of -3 dB. Aligning the tracks as best I could, I got this:

Log audio on top, Eudora chime underneath

The Eudora sample is very slightly slower than the Log one. It might have been that the Eudora authors sampled the chimes from an analogue video tape. The match is remarkable, however, as they play together with only very slight phasing effects:

(direct link: Log_vs_Eudora-log_left-Eudora_right.wav)

Conclusion

Yes, the Eudora Mail “New Mail” chime did come from Ren & Stimpy after all.

5 comments

  1. Just thought of the Eudora new mail chime out of nowhere and found this article. Brilliant!! I love it so much. Thanks for all the research!

  2. Thanks for the sound “Eudora-log” version I’ve downloaded it and use it for my email client.

  3. Just to shake things up a bit 🙂 What if the creators of Ren and Stimpy “borrowed” that sound from Eudora? Eudora was created in 1988, and sold to Qualcomm in 1991 (month unknown) who took the Mac only program and made a PC version while beefing it up. Señors Ren and Stimpy first graced our screens in August 1991. So who came first? Thanks for the fun post.

  4. I just found an artifact in my Thunderbird settings. I tend to pass these profiles down every time I upgrade T-bird or put it on a new machine. The new mail sound was file:///home/edg/eudora-mail.mp3 Of course that didn’t point to anything any more. So I’m glad to be able to download it and set it up again 🙂

  5. The Ren & Stimpy “Log” song was actually a parody of the Slinky TV “fun for a girl and a boy” ad. I have not yet found the actual Slinky song that starts the same, but it must have been 60’s or 70’s.

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