This is Lex Luthor. Only one thing alive with less than four legs can hear this frequency, Superman, and that's you

The quote above makes me chuckle, while looking at the RTA it makes me laugh that only dogs and Superman can hear an audible frequency at 4KHz! Now I know this was the first EVER 70mm fully six-track Dolby film to carry stereo surrounds and limitations regarding frequency response was near or could reach 16KHz and why wasn’t the tone pushed for higher ear bending top end like 10KHz or above 4KHz is so easy.

I guess the imagination would have to say this pitch is 25KHz or 30KHz! 4KHz really. It doesn't even get my cat excited.

The new re-mix was no better well at least it was preserving 80% of the films DOLBY film mix the SE mix could have pushed the tone up higher because higher tones played responsibly loud will bend the ear and have you placing your fingers over the ears for brief moment.

It's just dramatic license. After all, the audience has to hear the tone. If you like, you can imagine that it's a sub-harmonic generated by IM distorion at F/8 or some such.

Yet films over the years started using higher pitched tones. The Truman Show (1998) the car radio scene with high pitch now that is high frequency that bent my ears over in the cinema and in the home.

Probably the distributors expected better performance from theatre sound systems of 1998 than from those of the 1970s. After all, while there were top-of-the-line roadshow houses, many places at the time had very old monaural sound systems which may have been put in place when sound film first came in. Not to mention drive-in theatres which were broadcasting to car radios, with very limited performance.

That too an also be the case it took a few more years for state of the art to catch up with flat power response cinema JBL systems. But why didn’t they just go with 8KHz surely that was easy enough to do.

I wonder what Pinewood recoding studios was using at the time?