The Terminator 2 sound crew got very inventive. They had to design the sound of the T-1000 Terminator moving into and out of liquid metal, the quality that makes him virtually indestructible. ''It's not really liquid ...'' sound man Gary Rydstrom says. ''It doesn't have any bubbles in it. It doesn't gurgle. It doesn't do anything visually except flow like mercury ...'' So Rydstrom gathered a number of sound elements and played them while watching the screen to see what sounded good. When the T-1000
is just sort of flowing and transforming, that's Rydstrom plunging a microphone covered with a condom into a mixture he made of flour and water with Dust-Off sprayed into it. ''It would make these huge goopy bubbles,'' he says. ''And the moment when the bubble is forming, it has this sound that's similar to a cappucino maker ... Funny enough, it had this metallic quality to it, so I believed it for [the] transformation.''