Answering Echo
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O who will show me those delights on high? —George Herbert (1593-1633), "Heaven"
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Echoes can be fun in real life. You shout into a cave, and hear the sound back. This happens due to sound vibrations.
In fiction, echoes are not just there to demonstrate the power of sound. Someone asks a question. A voice answers—but not in its own words, just repeating the last few words of the first person's question. This is the Answering Echo.
Sometimes in musicals this can be played for dramatic effect when the chorus reprises bits of the main melody. It can also be played for laughs.
Examples of Answering Echo include:
Film
- The My Little Pony movie had a song done entirely like this between Baby Lickety Split, who was bemoaning her troubles at a well, and Flutter Pony Morning Glory, who was trapped inside.
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No one's in a fix like I am (I am) |
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- Played with in Frozen II, with the mysterious voice that Elsa hears throughout the movie, particularly during the song "Into The Unknown". She hears it before saying anything, but it does seem to respond when she begins to call out to the world at large.
Literature
- In Anne of Green Gables, Anne says that she made up a friend who could only echo her responses, using a natural environment's echoes to say goodbye to her. Marilla is heartbroken by this as she drives Anne to the orphanage where the adoption mix-up happened, and it makes Anne's friendship with Diana much more poignant as Diana is Anne's first real friend.
- Echoes from the Boogiepop novel can only communicate like this.
- As part of refurbishing the used space suit he won in a soap contest, Kip from Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel rigs up a "repeater circuit" to work with its radio, which will echo back to him anything he says after a few seconds. It contributes to Kip eventually treating the suit -- which he's named "Oscar the Mechanical Man" -- as a Companion Cube, and even hallucinating a conversation with it as he lies near death on the surface of Pluto.
Live-Action TV
- Played to horrifying effect in Doctor Who in the episode "Midnight" where a hostile alien mimics others and repeats their last sentences, forcing them to imitate each other. When the Doctor tries to calm down the passengers, they accuse him of being the alien. It's only by sheer luck and a Heroic Bystander that the Doctor isn't executed.
- Happens in an episode of I Love Lucy when the Mertzes and Ricardos are driving to California. The women ask a gas station attendant for directions back to the highway after getting lost, but the men can hear in the car. When they learn they're in Tennessee, each person says, "Tennessee?!" in succession, ending with Ricky and Fred. The confused gas attendant says that funny echoes happen in these parts. This gag proceeds to repeat when the gang learns to get back to the highway, they have to drive through Bent Fork, where cousin Ernie Ford lives. As they all say "Bent Fork!?" with horror, the gas attendant says the echo is happening again. Ricky then gets out of the car to clarify the situation.
Music
- The aria "Treues Echo dieser Orten" from J.S. Bach's secular cantata Hercules auf dem Scheidewege. Much of the music of this cantata, including this aria, was adapted into the fourth part of the Christmas Oratorio.[context?]
Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends
- Trope Namer and Ur Example (Older Than Feudalism): the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, told by the Roman writer Ovid.
Puppet Shows
- Sesame Street
- "Put Down the Ducky" features this in the chorus as Mr. Hoots tries to convince Ernie to put down his rubber ducky while practicing sax. After all, as Hoots sings, "Put down the ducky" as the chorus reprises it, so that you can play
- One song in features this: "Be My Echo". You repeat what the last person sings, and try to match it. Madeline Kahn and Grover performed it once.
Theatre
- The Inquisition in Bernstein's Candide delivers its judgments this way.
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Three Inquisitors: Are our methods legal or illegal? |
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- In The Golden Apple, after Ulysses has lost all of his friends, he questions himself about love, faith, hope and dreams. Mother Hare and the chorus echo his words as somewhere in space they hang suspended.
Western Animation
- Steven Universe:
- Lapis while trapped in a mirror could only communicate by playing reflections of people who have talked to her. Steven decides to free her when she repeats his Big No and explains that she's not a mirror, but a living being trapped inside of one since the Gem War. Lapis becomes more eloquent once Steven frees her and heals her gem, albeit super-traumatized for understandable reasons.
- Blue and Yellow Pearl do this when accompanying Yellow Diamond during her song "What's the Use of Feeling Blue?" They also provide some beautiful harmonies, helped by the fact that they both share the same voice actress.
- When Steven meets the Pebbles, they do this while he sings to himself about how the Diamonds are acting like how the Crystal Gems used to act towards Steven.
- In the movie, Amethyst starts doing this after Spinel rejuvenates her starts acting like a small child and repeating the last few words of Steven's sentences. To find her missing piece, Steven starts singing with her, and recreating some of their previous adventures. It's a very sweet scene.
- One therapist in Tuca & Bertie suggests this as a strategy to prevent panic attacks. Bertie tries it, but it ends up not working.