Hacker Cinema
Alvin and the Chipmunks
2007 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Tim Hill
A struggling songwriter named Dave Seville finds success when he comes across a trio of singing chipmunks: mischievous leader Alvin, brainy Simon, and chubby, impressionable Theodore.
2 negative3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Fictional bands and artist are pretty common in Japan and also sweeped over to South-Korea at some point I think. But funny enough, the oldest are western bands. Remember "Alvin and the Chipmunks"? From 1958, with new series and movies even released today. Long before the first virtual Idol appeared in Japan in 198x. It seems in the 60s&70s there were a bunch of them in the USA, from Hanna-Barbera and others. Japan started with Macross in 1981 and continued for decades until today. I guess, now South-Korea and probably China are trying to take the crown of anime and virtual artists, they had some very disruptive successes in the last years.
Wikipedia has a whole list of "Virtual bands", though I'm unfamiliar with most of them. I think they're seen differently because they are a standalone band, rather than being part of a movie or promotional item. Something more in line with Huntrix would be Alvin and the Chipmunks, being a group that are part of other things, rather than a group in their own right
Which is understandable. 21st Century Fox was a much larger company than any of the other three mentioned companies - with sales offices, distribution deals with other studios, physical movie studios, large television production units (especially that output content in the UK/AU).
21st Century Fox also owned the rights to hundreds of movies (Avatar, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Dr. Seuss) and plenty of television (1/3 of Hulu, The Simpsons).
They also had the movie rights to some of the Marvel characters. I don't know how much that was worth to Igor, but it seems that he really wants to get the family all back under one roof.
It's interesting that you mention the ABC acquisition - in today's money that would cost $36.09 billion - just roughly half of the Fox acquisition.
Thank you, Common Sense Media.
Your website helped me get control over what my wife and parents were exposing my four year old daughter to, by establishing a neutral source of extremely valuable information. It became very easy to set guidelines thanks to your rating system and the wide range of titles reviewed.
The new 3D animation style and cutesy animal characters are dangerously subversive. My mom thought I was being a grinch until I made her read a review from CSM of the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie she wanted to show my daughter:
"There was a scene where the male Air Marshall (who was following them), woke up in a drunken haze (yes, there was a scene where shots and drinks were involved) with 2 new tattoos and in the bedroom or hotel room with another man (and all that that implied)."
There is just no way this stuff is age appropriate. I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.
The Illumination Studios pictures are particularly insidious. I believe their content is generally inappropriate for young children, deleterious to moral character, culturally degenerate, etc. The character design aesthetics are offensive and stupefying. I wasn't surprised to find the same creative oversight involved in the duff Chipmunks pictures.
Case in point is Sing, which when I looked it up, it turns out the movie is notorious for culturally stereotyped presentation of Japanese people, and animal singers who shake their butts around. There's no way young children can appropriately contextualize either of these things.
Branding is important.
Although I said I wouldn't disclose the data, here is a spreadsheet of the Top Movies by Box Office Revenue with a RT score <= 20%: https://www.icloud.com/numbers/0005voEEmzex1t4xnMHD3u3HQ#box-office
Films like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Grown Ups are objectively bad, but they still make money because people don't care. Yes, these movies likely had a lower budget, and that can be weighed against box office revenue, but I explained my concerns with that in the article.