Dan Seitz of Marvel’s Flying Monkeys (a podcast where they discuss every Marvel movie minute by minute) joins us to discuss one of his personal childhood faves, 1987’s The Chipmunk Adventure.
Image Description: Alvin, in just a loincloth, tooth necklace, and red baseball cap, faces off against Brittany, who’s wearing a pink harem outfit. Their stature is small, but their egos are extremely large.
This one is a WILD ride!
We reminisce about USA’s Up All Night with Rhonda Shear, and dive down a bunch of weird rabbit holes related to the production of this movie.
If you need a Chipmunk Masseuse (or to be part of a roomful of hotties doing yoga and pilates while Madonna checks out their bodies and knows she’s satisfied), you might want to hire Siri D. Galliano.
The music in this movie is written by a bunch of talented songwriters, including Terry Shaddick, who wrote “Physical” (popularized by Olivia Newton John), Donna Weiss, who co-wrote “Bette Davis Eyes” along with Kim Carnes, Randy Goodrum, who wrote a bunch of hit songs, and Barry De Vorzon, who wrote a song for a different movie that later became a top hit as “Nadia’s Theme” after it was used as a background for a montage of gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s performances in a recap of the 1976 Olympics. The song was also used as the theme for The Young and the Restless.
Of course The Chipmunk Adventure also included songs originally written by the Chipmunks’ creator, Ross Bagdasarian, father of the current Chipmunks IP owner (and successor as the voice of Dave, Alvin, and Simon). Fun Fact: he named his alter ego David Seville because he was stationed in Seville, Spain during World War II.
We also talk a bit about the egregiously racist stuff in this one, from the really horrible lecherous child sheikh and hostile jungle natives scenes to the Mexican festival with a Carmen Miranda number. Carmen Miranda was Brazilian and felt frustrated with the way she wasn’t allowed to break out of a specific stereotype of “Latin culture” in her career. She’s beloved and credited with paving the way for popular tropicalia artists of the 1960s, but it’s complicated, and none of that is something The Chipmunk Adventure acknowledges or engages with when using one of her songs for a scene in a country that is definitely not Brazil. And then also we can’t forget the sombrero shaped Taco Bell kind of establishment plopped in the middle of Mexico city, which Julia thought would fit right in at South of the Border, a roadside attraction in South Carolina with its own complicated race-related history.
This Chipmunks journey is a wild ride, and the After These Messages episode coming up in a couple of days promises to be something else, too, since we’re committed to watching part of Malibu Bikini Shop…
The Chipmunk Adventure with Dan Seitz