Lost Classic: Alvin & the Chipmunks, cartoon-making for Reagan’s America
On a recent family visit I walked into the living room; my niece, 7, told me excitedly she was going to watch Alvin & the Chipmunks. Flickers of my own halcyon days watching kids’ TV in the 90s danced across my mind. CBBC. CITV (remember that?). Otis the Aardvark. Renting a whole series on VCR from Blockbuster Video. More excited than it’s acceptable for a 30 year-old man to be, I threw myself onto the sofa with nostalgia-soaked glee.
But it was not to be. The new incarnation of the Chipmunks phenomenon, like every other children’s TV show these days, deploys assembly-line CGI and crude, blocky modelling – doubtless on the cheap – to generate identikit episodes in a pale homage to the original. My heart sank.
So I decided to go back to the original. Of course, my own childhood experience of the brilliant 80s series was far from authentic, and that show wasn’t even the original. The immensely popular Alvin & the Chipmunks that began in 1983 (the year of the second Thatcher victory, pleasingly) was itself the reincarnation of a set of characters originally conceived in the Fifties. I was also watching the majority of the episodes long after they aired.
The 80s show is brilliant. The opening chords and riff are shamelessly hopeful, optimistic and unabashed. Spotlights, red carpets and limousines adorn the addictively rewatchable intro sequence, the whole piece oozing glitz. The electric guitars and showbiz feel reflect an era of unironic, self-confident Americana made all the more refreshing by virtue of its being held up as a positive vision to children.
But the Chipmunks series doesn’t just peddle capitalistic rock n’ roll and superficial pazazz. The themes of every episode celebrate wholesome, morally infused character-building. The wooden houses, white picket fences, high school soccer coaches, childhood sweethearts and coming-of-age watersheds display echoes of The Wonder Years. The moral structure of every storyline places responsibility firmly on the individual – usually the hapless and imperfect ‘munks – and the mistakes they make. Never finger-pointing at ‘society’ and with no hint of the next decade’s cult of political correctness in sight, this is cartoon-making for the Reagan era.
With hindsight some of the stories may smack as propagandistic – consider the episode when Dave, the main characters’ adoptive father figure, teaches Alvin about the importance of advertising if he wants to run a successful lemonade stand. But for the most part, the 80s Chipmunks show addresses the landmarks and hurdles facing every child entering their teenage years: not getting selected for a school team, the loss of a pet, sibling rivalry, falling in love, rebellion against older and wiser parent figures, moving house, the way in which lying inevitably comes back to bite you.
A highlight for me is when the ever-optimistic Alvin, who is characterised by Mr Toad-like impulsiveness and egotism, decides to bring down the ‘Wall of Iron’ (a renamed Berlin Wall). He achieves this Cold War-ending feat of international relations by – what for it – playing rock music so loud it shatters the foundations of the wall’s structure, reuniting East and West Berlin. If that’s not upbeat American triumphalism, I don’t know what is.
Alvin & the Chipmunks emerges from a time and a culture in which Europe and America were getting richer, the Soviet Union was in decline and there was an overwhelming feeling that the West was winning. This self-assured, pre-9/11 world feels impossible to recover now; with jaded Millennial eyes the Chipmunks looks naïve. But the themes it throws into focus – maturity, relationships, forgiveness, learning from one’s mistakes, and most importantly the primacy of family love – are themes rooted in reality and the daily experience of ordinary people. Its infectious positivity, fortified by the natural desire to lament for a simpler time, is hard to resist.