Those Chipmunks Preach Bad Values

When the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie came out just before Christmas last winter, I went to go see it, primarily for nostalgic reasons. And, it looked awesome.

I used to watch the cartoon when I was a child, and it'd always help me to get into the Christmas spirit, something that is still extremely important to me. The movie definitely served this purpose, and I was amazed by the special effects that people can now use in movies, as I have been many times throughout the last five years, but there was one thing that really disturbed me about the storyline that I'd never really noticed before:

The chipmunks series promotes everything that is wrong in adolescent and teenage society, though most kids would not recognize it until they've aged a few years and have had to actually take care of themselves for a while.

Firstly, Simon gets no love. Simon is the nerdy one, or, to put it more accurately, the smart one. He doesn't get treated unfairly by Alvin or Theodore, but it's easy to see that he is the chipmunk that gest shunned the most from the limelight. In the movie and in the old animated cartoons Simon has the fewest speaking lines, and when he does say something, it's something smart or precautionary to the other chipmunks or their human friend, Dave.

It's weird, because Theodore, though adorable, is an absolute idiot as far as talking chipmunks go, which I guess isn't saying much, but you know what I mean. He's funny for the occasional cute comment or yearning for parental love, but other than that he's a chubby little guy with an alto voice that completes their musical trio.

Alvin might be even worse. Though by far the most incredibly hip chipmunk, you can tell that he's going to be the character that ends up in a bar for the rest of his life drinking Schlitz and talking about the glory days on the high school soccer team. Well, instead of high school sports, he'll be talking about his childhood recording contract. Basically, he'll turn out to be the chipmunk version of Jesse McCartney.

The most readily apparent trait of the show that verifies it's absurdity towards values is simply the title Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you saw an episode of the television show without words or the lettered labels on the fronts of the chipmunk's sweaters, you would immediately think that Dave was the character named Alvin. It'd be a logical assumption, since Dave is the only one of the four characters that is not, in fact, a fucking chipmunk. Not only that, but he is the main caretaker of the little guys. Without him , they would be straight fucked. They'd have no food or shelter, since their tree in the wilderness was cut down and they were brought to a shopping mall unknowingly as part of a Christmas tree. Furthermore, they would not have become teenage pop stars.

They would've just ended up like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan if they hadn't had their forceful mothers. (Maybe not a bad thing now, but look back on the days of "Hit Me Baby One More Time," and Mean Girls. My childhood would have been empty of boner jam material without those two sex demons.)

I fear that if children get too into Alvin and the Chipmunks, they'll begin to take the things that their parents give them and contribute to their lives for granted. This is a grave matter.

It could've all been avoided if Dave would've just opened his damn mouth and asked for some recognition.