Even Star Wars nonfans (really????) know the sound. It is the heavy breathing that sets apart the iconic villain Darth Vader (well, that and his theme music and evil-looking mask).

When George Lucas began work on Star Wars in the mid-1970s, he asked a USC classmate, Ben Burtt, Jr., to create all the sounds for the film about Luke Skywalker, a sheltered teen on the desert planet Tatooine who ends up saving the galaxy. Burtt, a legendary American sound designer, film editor and voice actor, had a number of inspirations for many of the sound effects heard in the Star Wars film franchise, including R2-D2's "voice," the lightsaber hum and the sound of the blaster guns. Burtt used a lion's roar for the sound of the Millenium Falcon's engine. Chewbacca’s grunts, whimpers and wails? ”Mostly bears, with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in," Burtt has explained when asked how he found the sounds to create the character of Chewbacca's voice. As he would later recall about visiting Long Beach's Marineland of the Pacific, which closed in 1987, "Its pool had been drained for cleaning—the walrus was stranded at the bottom, moaning—and that was the sound!"

Burtt was also the creator of Darth Vader's sinister-sounding heavy breathing. Burtt used an old Dacor scuba regulator to create the heavy breathing of Darth Vader. "The original concept I had of Darth Vader was a very noise-producing individual," Burtt has said. "He came out into a scene, he was breathing like some … windmill. You could hear his heart beating, he'd move his head you'd hear motors turning." But the sound designer quickly abandoned that approach—"He sounded like an operating room, an emergency room"—and instead placed a microphone inside a scuba regulator.

"When you breathe through it you could hear the valve opening and closing," Burtt told NPR in 2008. "It had a little bit of a click and clank to it. And the flow of air through the narrow rubber hoses had a really cold, very hissy quality to it. It was unreal."

We were unable to find the actual Dacor reg model used (in one YouTube video, the reg was misidentified as a respirator). Dacor was one of the five original United States diving gear makers: U.S. Divers, Healthways, Voit, Dacor and Swimaster. Dacor is now merged with Mares.

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