Alvin And The Chipmunks Description
Alvin and the Chipmunks
is a five-time Grammy Award-winning animated music group,
created by Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. in 1958. The group consists
of three singing animated chipmunks: Alvin, the mischievous
troublemaker, who quickly became the star of the group;
Simon, the tall, bespectacled intellectual; and Theodore,
the chubby, impressionable sweetheart. The trio is "managed"
by their human "father" and confidant, David Seville.
In reality, David Seville was Bagdasarian's stage name,
and the Chipmunks themselves are named after the executives
of their original record label, Liberty Records: Alvin Bennett
(the president), Simon Waronker (the founder and owner),
and Theodore Keep (the chief engineer).
The Chipmunks act began with
recordings, first brought to life in Bagdasarian's 1950s
novelty recordings under the name David Seville and the
Chipmunks. For stage purposes, such as The Ed Sullivan Show,
Bagdasarian lip-synched the words of "David Seville",
in front of a small puppet "theater", with vaguely
realistic-looking puppets of the three Chipmunks also "lip-synching",
looking similar to the vaguely-realistic looking Chipmunk
illustrations on the covers of some of the 45 RPM records.
The characters were an unprecedented success, and the singing
Chipmunks and their manager were given life in several animated
cartoon series, using redrawn, anthropomorphic chipmunks,
and eventually motion pictures.
The voices of the group were
all performed by Bagdasarian, who sped up the playback to
create the higher pitched, squeaky voices. This oft-used
process was also not entirely new to Bagdasarian, who had
also used it for a previous novelty song project, "The
Witch Doctor", but it was so unusual and well executed
it earned the "trio" two Grammy Awards for engineering.
Although the characters were fictional, they did release
a long line of "real" albums and singles, with
"The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)"
becoming a number-one hit single in the United States. After
his death in 1972, the voices of the Chipmunks were subsequently
recorded by his son, Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., and his wife,
Janice Karman, in all subsequent incarnations to date with
the exception of the 2007 feature film
