Halfway down the Danube

Review: The Chipmunk Adventure (1987) -- Part One

You think I'm joking?

We get one cartoon channel here. It's German, which is fine -- the boys need to keep up their German anyway.

The cartoon channel always has a big Sunday afternoon matinee movie. Since it comes in by satellite, and we're three hours ahead of Germany, for us it's a big Sunday night movie. It's always a feature-length animated film, shown intact without any commercial interruptions. Which doesn't mean it's any good, of course... in fact, the norm is some dreadful straight-to-video cartoon.

But this week it was The Chipmunk Adventure.

(Do you want to read about the Chipmunks and the Chipmunk Adventure? No? Then go away now and click on something else.)

So, the Chipmunks.

The Chipmunks started as a gag musical act back in the 1950s. An American singer named David Seville did a song with a squeaky-voiced chorus; he simply sang slowly into the recording machine, then played it back at double speed. The result was his voice at normal speed, but an octave higher. (If you've ever heard a Chipmunks song, this explanation is unneccessary.)

The Chipmunks songs were a huge hit, so the singer and some friends came up with characters -- cartoon chipmunks -- to fit the voices: Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, the Chipmunks. The Chipmunks soon had their own animated TV series, and have been a minor part of US popular culture ever since, occupying a space somewhere between Casper the Friendly Ghost and Underdog.

Digression #1: David Seville, the singer who came up with the Chipmunks? His real name was Ross Bagdasarian, and he was an Armenian-American from Fresno -- first cousin to William Saroyan, the writer. He died in 1972, but his son has continued to run Bagdasarian Productions... a firm that exists purely to make and market Chipmunks movies, cartoons, and albums.

Digression #2: There are a lot of Chipmunk albums. They did an astounding number of covers of popular songs, and then of course there was the remarkable Chipmunk Punk. Which was cited by Kurt Cobain as a creative influence on Nirvana. I am not making this up. It included covers of "Good Girls Don't", Tom Petty's "Refugee" and, of course, "My Sharona".

(Have you ever listened to the lyrics of "My Sharona"? Just trying to imagine this is making my head hurt. Please tell me they didn't cover that one straight. Please.)

Where were we... oh yes, the Chipmunks. So in 1987: the Chipmunks movie. A feature-length animated film released across the US, starring the Chipmunks and their female counterparts, the Chipettes.

Here's one of many weirdnesses about the Chipmunk world. The Chipmunks live with their adopted father, songwriter David Seville. Yah, that's right... their "father" in the movie is their creator outside the movie. I guess that's sort of neat, and we can put aside questions of how a normal human adopts three anthropoid talking animals... it's a kid's cartoon, okay.

But what blows my mind about this is that the Chipmunks "dad" looks... well... Armenian. Yes. I mean, he has thick glossy black hair, a noble blade of a nose, and eyebrows like Groucho. He's a handsome fellow, but this raises mind-twisting questions. The best interpretation I can come up with is that Bagdasarian Senior came up with the idea as a joke for the original TV cartoon -- "Ah, I'll put my alter ego into the cartoon, but he'll be a secret Armenian anyway!" -- and then Bagdasarian Junior carried it on.

Weirder still: the 1960 cartoon had a version of David Seville who looked like Bagdasarian Senior. The 1987 cartoon has a David Seville who looks very different (though still Armenian). I strongly suspect he's a cartoon version of Bagdasarian Junior. Junior's image is strangely hard to find online, so I can't prove this, but if true... that's beyond whimsical into seriously strange.

"Son, you must carry on... you must..."

"Yes, Papa! Yes!"

"But promise me, son..."

"Yes, Papa? Anything!"

"Alvin and the others... they must never know..."

Where was I... so the Chipmunks live with their adopted father, but as the movie starts, he has to go away on business. Always a promising start for a kids' movie, right?

I can't do this justice in one post. Part 2 in a day or so.

Posted by douglas at October 2, 2006 12:46 PM