Origins
The origins of the Chipettes can be traced to the 1982 Alvin and the Chipmunks album The Chipmunks Go Hollywood (RCA, 1982). On this album, Alvin sings a duet with a female character billed as Charlene the Chipette. Charlene is featured on the song "You're the One That I Want" from the soundtrack of the motion picture Grease. Charlene was depicted on the album cover as having a long, blonde ponytail, and seems to have been the basis for the later character of Brittany. She later made a visual appearance in 1990, in Rockin' with the Chipmunks, where she danced and lip-synced in the music video for "Crocodile Rock" by Elton John.
Like the Chipmunks, the Chipettes were originally created for the musical medium, and later crossed over into cartoons. According to their creator, Janice Karman, she and Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., "...had been doing the albums at that point... We couldn't do the girl songs. I wanted to do female chipmunks that have counter personalities to the Chipmunks so we could do some girl tunes."
Bagdasarian also added in reference to the Chipettes characters, "It enables you to deal with issues that girls are going through that boys wouldn't necessarily be dealing with... We had a baby girl at the time. We wanted to let her know she can be president, or a soccer champion, or whatever... With the Chipettes we can handle those sorts of things."
It is worth noting, however, that the Chipettes of the cartoon series (Brittany, Jeanette and Eleanor) appeared on the small screen before appearing on any albums. Their first appearance on the Chipmunks album was on 1984's Songs From Our TV Shows which was released on March 4, 1984, nearly seven months after the Chipettes debuted on the first episode of the Alvin and the Chipmunks television series on September 17, 1983.
Although the Chipettes featured prominently on many Alvin and the Chipmunks albums, they received equal billing with the Chipmunks only on 1988's Born to Rock.
The Chipettes appear in the 2009 film Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. In the movie, Christina Applegate, Anna Faris, and Amy Poehler voice the Chipettes. “There has been a lot of talk about it,” noted Janice Karman, one of the film’s producers. “A lot of people have been asking about the little girls." Applegate, Faris, and Poehler reprised their respective roles in Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, which was released on December 16, 2011.
Read more about this topic: The Chipettes
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