The Monster Sound Show was an opening-day Disney-MGM Studios attraction that perfectly reflected the park’s original mission: pulling guests behind the curtain to show how movies and television were made. Opening with the park on May 1, 1989, the show was located in the park’s sound-focused theater space near Echo Lake and was presented by Sony. It introduced guests to the art of Foley, the process of creating and synchronizing everyday sound effects for filmed entertainment.
The main presentation centered on a short horror-comedy film starring Chevy Chase as an unlucky insurance salesman and Martin Short as a deranged butler trying to eliminate him. The premise gave the show plenty of exaggerated sound opportunities: creaking doors, thunder, rain, breaking glass, crashing objects, and other comic suspense beats. Four guests were selected from the audience to perform the effects live using props and timing cues, and the humor came from watching how well—or badly—their sounds matched the action on screen. After the performance, the completed version played back for the full theater, turning a technical lesson into a lighthearted payoff.
What made The Monster Sound Show work was its combination of education and participation. It taught a real production concept without becoming dry, and it gave ordinary guests a temporary role in “making” a movie. That made it especially well suited to early Disney-MGM Studios, when the park leaned heavily into working-studio demonstrations, soundstages, animation production, stunt work, and television-industry showcases. It was not a thrill ride, but it fit the park’s identity as a place where guests could see the machinery behind entertainment.
The attraction also included a post-show area called Soundworks, where guests could experiment with sound effects, voice replacement, and audio-based interactive exhibits. This helped extend the attraction beyond the theater and made sound design feel playful and accessible.
The Monster Sound Show was replaced on July 1, 1997, by ABC Sound Studio, also known as One Saturday Morning Sound Show, which kept the basic sound-effects concept but tied it to 101 Dalmatians: The Series and ABC’s Saturday morning programming. That version closed in 1999 and was followed by Sounds Dangerous with Drew Carey.
Today, The Monster Sound Show is remembered as a quintessential early Disney-MGM Studios attraction: modest in scale, clever in concept, and rooted in the idea that the process of creating entertainment could be entertaining in its own right. It represents a version of the park that was less about stepping into franchise worlds and more about discovering how those worlds were built.
