Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz The Chipmunks: Ross Bagdasarian Jr. & Janice Karman (2017) About this episode Years after his father created a hit singing group of anthropomorphic rodents called The Chipmunks, Ross Bagdasarian Jr. made it his mission to revive his dad's beloved characters. Over the last 40 years, Ross Jr. and his wife Janice have built The Chipmunks into a billion dollar media franchise – run out of their home in Santa Barbara, California. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," we check back in with Alexander Van Dewark, who created a portable mat that helps people mix cement without a wheelbarrow or a paddle. (Original Broadcast Date: September 18, 2017.)
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0:00 Guy Raz? Hey, it's Guy here. Just a quick note before we start the show. We have one week left in our annual public radio fundraiser, and we're asking you to show your support for How I Built This and for your local public radio station. Now, you've heard me say it all month, so please just take a moment to give your gift before the end of the year. Just go to donate.npr.org/built to support your local NPR station. And thanks. OK, a little bit about today's episode. So right around this time of year, I can pretty much guarantee you're going to be out in the world, at a restaurant, at a mall, wherever. And suddenly, out of some distant speaker.
0:44 Guy Raz? And I imagine some of you might really love this song, and others, maybe not so much. But either way, it was the very first time the Chipmunks appeared on the scene as a singing trio. This was 60 years ago. And now, well, we can't imagine our childhoods without them and the massive brand they built. And that's pretty much what this episode is about. It first ran in the fall of last year, and it's a super fun episode. Enjoy.
1:18 Speaker 01 We are told by the record executive, Ross, Janice, I want you guys to take the Chipmunks on the road. We want you to take them. These are the seven cities we want you to go to and make this album a hit in these seven cities. And if you do that, we will give you a big national promotion. We hit the road. We, in fact, make the album a hit in each one of the seven cities. We come back to the record executive. The record executive tells Janice and me, well, we're not actually going to do the national release and the big marketing. I said, wait, wait. I said, you told us that if we-- he said,
2:00 Speaker 01 if you don't have it in writing, you don't have it.
2:10 Guy Raz? From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
2:22 Guy Raz? I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a husband-and-wife team built a billion-dollar brand around three singing chipmunks.
2:40 Guy Raz? If you were to build, say, a Pantheon or a Mount Rushmore of Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s, a statue to Alvin and the Chipmunks would be right there alongside the Smurfs, the Gummy Bears, Inspector Gadget. It was one of NBC's biggest hits, three singing rodents, Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and their exasperated but kind manager/foster dad, Dave Seville.
3:06 Speaker 01 Has anyone seen my tie?
3:08 Speaker 02 You're wearing it, Dave.
3:09 Guy Raz? Now, all these voices.
3:11 Speaker 02 Don't forget your mittens, Dave.
3:12 Guy Raz? Theodore, Alvin, Simon, Dave, they were all voiced by two people.
3:17 Speaker 01 Am I forgetting anything? Me!
3:20 Guy Raz? Ross Baggessarian Jr. and his wife, Janice.
3:24 Speaker 03 I'm Theodore.
3:25 Speaker 01 And I'm Alvin and Simon and Dave.
3:26 Guy Raz? All right, gotcha, OK.
3:28 Speaker 03 Do you want us to talk at half-speed?
3:31 Guy Raz? So Ross and Janice didn't just voice the characters, they pretty much ran and run the company that is Alvin and the Chipmunks. The movies, the merch, the TV syndication, the live shows, all of that's brought in billions, billions of dollars for studios and networks and arenas and even quite a bit for Ross and Janice. And that's in part because unlike most other creative people in Hollywood, Ross and Janice own the Chipmunks. They own the intellectual property. And so Chipmunks, Inc. is pretty much a family business, run out of Ross and Janice's house near Santa Barbara, California. Now, they didn't actually invent the Chipmunks. The actual inventor was Ross's dad, Ross Sr.
4:20 Guy Raz? Back in 1958, Ross Sr. was a struggling songwriter who was looking for a break. And that break came when he figured out a way to change the pitch of his singing voice. And the result? The Witch Doctor Song.
4:40 Guy Raz? So this song became a hit and Ross soon came up with this concept that it was sung by these anthropomorphic rodents, he called the Chipmunks. And all of a sudden, Ross Sr.'s career took off. The Chipmunks became a radio show and then a cartoon on television. And for Ross Jr., he watched his dad become famous.
5:00 Speaker 01 100%. It changed literally overnight. First with Witch Doctor, which was like March 1958, and then, of course, the Chipmunks were that November, December 58. So we got a swimming pool. So I was, I was much more impressed that we had a swimming pool than that my dad was on the Ed Sullivan Show doing the Witch Doctor, or Dick Clark's American Bandstand, or whatever. I remember he would always bring my brother and sister and I into his den and play, whether it was Witch Doctor, or the Chipmunk Song, or whatever. And we loved, when Alvin started talking back to our dad, we just fell in love with
5:44 Speaker 01 not just the song, but the audacity of that little character. Because we, we didn't really talk back to my dad that much. So we thought Alvin really had a lot of spunk that we admired.
5:56 Guy Raz? What was your dad like? Was he, was he, I mean, I'm thinking of the guy who sang and wrote the Witch Doctor. Was he this impresario? Was he charismatic? Was he silly?
6:05 Speaker 01 You know what? He was all of that guy. He was bigger than life. He was sort of the Armenian version of Zorba the Greek. So, all 5'7" of him, but you always thought, and everyone who met him, thought that he was 6'5". He just carried himself that way. But he was funny. He was incredibly creative. He loved music and really thought of himself as a musician. He loved songwriting and started writing songs when he was 16 years old, driving a truck in the vineyards of Fresno. And his first song was called "Nuts To You." So, from nuts came little chipmunks.
6:46 Guy Raz? Yeah. So when you were a kid, Ross, did you think that you would be involved in, in the family business?
6:53 Speaker 01 A hundred percent no. You know, growing up, I didn't even want to go to the recording sessions. My dad would say, hey, do you want to come and see how we do this? And what I go, yeah, no, Pop, I got a big Little League game here. So I'm gonna not make it to that. But growing up, as I started to realize what kind of a career was I heading for, the only thing I was certain of while my dad was still alive was that I wasn't going to be involved with the Chipmunks or what my dad had done, not because I didn't love what he had created, but because they were such big shoes to fill that I didn't want to try and step into that.
7:36 Guy Raz? So I know, Ross, that I think you were 22 or 23 when your dad died. He was super young, like just in his early 50s.
7:46 Speaker 01 Right.
7:46 Guy Raz? What did he want you to do with your life?
7:49 Speaker 01 Well, after my dad passed away, and before he had passed away, he said, I really want to encourage you to go to law school. And I just hated that idea. But when he passed away, all of a sudden, you saw the kind of folks coming out of the woodwork that would try and take, whether it was music publishing from the family or wineries and vineyards that he had built up over the years. And I realized that my dad wanted me to go to law school, obviously not to become a lawyer, but basically to have a kind of a mental martial arts protection. Because he always had said, look, there's creating what you do, and then there's continuing to own what you do.
8:34 Speaker 01 And those are tough things to do at both times unless you know how to protect yourself and contracts and so forth. So after he passed away, I immediately enrolled in law school. So I graduated and three years later in 75, passed the bar, wasn't going to practice law, but wanted to know that with the music publishing and the things that I would hope to create later on, I wanted to know how to hold on to them as my dad had done.
9:04 Guy Raz? And did you, I mean, at that point, were you already thinking about? You know, ways to revive the Chipmunks?
9:12 Speaker 01 Yes. After my dad had passed away, I would go up into his office and just listen to the songs that he had done. I watched the old TV shows that he had done, The Alvin Show. And I just thought, I didn't want the Chipmunks to pass away as suddenly as my dad did. And I wanted to figure out some way to try and bring them back. So when I met Janice, and she had loved the characters growing up, and was one of the shows that her folks let her see. So I now had another believer with me. And I said, Jan, I just want to see if we can do this for, you know, just a year to bring, you know, kind of a tribute to my dad. And then, and then we'll go and do, you know, of course, all the other things
9:57 Speaker 01 that we're interested in doing.
9:59 Guy Raz? Can I just go back for a sec? Because I want to ask Janice about where you were at this point. Because you were, you were like, you were an actor in L.A., right?
10:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:07 Guy Raz? And so how did you, you and Ross meet?
10:09 Speaker 03 Well, we met at a health food vegetarian restaurant. And I went up to-
10:14 Guy Raz? This is in L.A.?
10:15 Speaker 03 In L.A. And I saw a friend of mine who was having dinner with Ross, who I didn't know. And I went up to her to say hello, and was introduced to Ross. And the following day, I got a bouquet of flowers where I was working. And the next day, I got another bouquet. And they were all signed by Ross. But I hadn't remembered his name. So I didn't know who was sending me these flowers.
10:41 Speaker 01 I made quite the impression, as you can tell.
10:43 Guy Raz? Yeah, you must have, yeah.
10:45 Speaker 03 These flowers went on for several weeks. And finally, he called. He said, hi, Jan, this is Ross. I said, Ross, thank you for those flowers. They're beautiful. Who are you?
10:59 Speaker 01 And from that-
11:01 Speaker 03 And then he asked me on a date. And it took about three years for me to come around.
11:06 Guy Raz? Wow, three years.
11:08 Speaker 03 Right. And so he took me to his father's office at night and it was, and I'm going up the elevator and I'm thinking, where are we going? And I didn't tell anybody I was going out with this guy and what are we doing in this building? And then he put on the, we walked into an office and he put on the old Chipmunks shows. And I thought, wow, this is interesting. And then he told me, he was the son of Ross Bagg, the Syrian. And I said, oh, my God, that was one of the few cartoon shows I watched and loved them. So then he said, you think they would be viable today? And I said, I would think so.
11:51 Speaker 01 And I had enlisted her on my impossible quest, my little Don Quixote, fighting these little windmills to get the Chipmunks back.
12:00 Guy Raz? To get the Chipmunks back.
12:01 Speaker 01 Exactly.
12:02 Guy Raz? So, I mean, you just like started trying to pitch people on this concept?
12:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, first, we went to CBS because they had run the old shows, the Alvin shows. So that seemed like a natural place to go. And they said, listen, we thought, we loved what your dad did. We thought it was great, but we think history has moved on and it had its wonderful time and that's, that's really over. So then we went to the music side of things. And I don't know if they had just spoken to the people at CBS, but they said, you know, that was a wonderful, wonderful characters and your dad had a great success, but we think that's, time has passed and you guys should move on to something else. You're young and capable and off you go.
12:45 Guy Raz? And did this just continue to happen? You would just go to studios and production companies and they would just turn you down?
12:50 Speaker 01 This went on for years.
12:52 Speaker 03 Everyone turned us down. For years.
12:54 Guy Raz? And so, Bob, why did you stick with it? I mean, you know, at that point, you're, I guess you're in your twenties.
13:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:01 Guy Raz? You've got a law degree, you've got all these possibilities, you're married at this point. So how long did you, you know, keep going out and getting rejected? I mean, how long was that period of time?
13:10 Speaker 03 Well, first of all, all those noes fueled Ross.
13:14 Speaker 01 Huh.
13:15 Speaker 03 And actually fueled me as well. So.
13:18 Speaker 01 And I would always say, Janice, write their names down. We're going, when we make this big, we're going to, when we see them again, we're going, oh, now you want it? Well, we're not going to give it to you.
13:29 Speaker 03 And I, like a fool, would take out my little pad and look at their name tags. Could you spell your last name for me?
13:35 Guy Raz? But I mean, really, how did you keep going at it? When all these people are saying, no, no, no, I mean, weren't, did you feel dejected? Didn't you just feel like humiliated or did you?
13:43 Speaker 01 No, honestly, I didn't. I just felt, oh, well, I am going to show them they're wrong. I know this is going to work. Janice believes in it. There's two of us, for goodness sakes. So, no, I was just more and more set on what, however long this took.
14:03 Guy Raz? Yeah, but I mean, look, to P-Devils advocate, you can understand for a moment, you can understand what, why a television executive at the time, somebody who's trying to find the next big thing and who's sort of incentivized to do it, would sort of look at your proposal and say, oh, that's a throwback to the 50s. We're doing like, we're doing really crazy things now. I mean, you could kind of understand that.
14:25 Speaker 03 You know, Ross taught me the power of tenacity. Guy, he pursued me for three years, every single day.
14:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, because, because, because I knew we were right, I knew this was the perfect person for me. And not to equate Janice with the chipmunks, but, but I honestly believe, when you really believe in something so clearly, it's so clear for you as that was for me, I didn't care what anybody else said. We were going to make this happen if it took a year or if it took three decades.
14:58 Guy Raz? But why did you believe that it would work? I mean, why, when all of these experts, I'm just curious, Ross, obviously, we know what happened, but when all of these people who were experts in television were saying, look, this is, this is old, this is a tired franchise. Like, you know, just enjoy life and.
15:14 Speaker 01 Right.
15:14 Guy Raz? I mean, why did you think they were wrong?
15:17 Speaker 01 Well, two, two, two things. Number one. What we came to realize is that there actually are no experts. You know, nobody really knows. And so I was just willing to put my belief above what other people were telling us. And Janice felt the same way. We thought they were good characters.
15:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, I felt I felt that, you know, in listening to The Chipmunk Song and The Witch Doctor and Alvin for President, that there was this relationship with Dave and this chipmunk that kept pushing his buttons. And I believed that relationship. And so did millions of other people. And he really, that Dave and Alvin really endeared themselves to us. And I thought if we could get that relationship in these shows, then it could happen again.
16:08 Guy Raz? So what happened? What was the turning point?
16:10 Speaker 03 The turning point was a disc jockey in Philadelphia at 3 o'clock in the morning, played a Blondie song and sped it up and told his listeners that it was the latest song from this album, Chipmunk Punk. He was being completely facetious.
16:25 Guy Raz? What was the Blondie song?
16:27 Speaker 03 Call Me.
16:33 Guy Raz? And he just sped it up and said it was a chipmunk version of Call Me?
16:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, he was probably bored and his switchboard lit up. And all these people called wanting to know where they could get the album. And a record company back he's found out about this and called us up and said, would you be interested in doing a chipmunk? We didn't even listen to the end of the sentence. We said, yes.
16:58 Guy Raz? It was just some random, small, was it a small record company?
17:00 Speaker 03 Small, yeah.
17:01 Guy Raz? They said, would you do a chipmunk punk album?
17:03 Speaker 03 Would you be interested in a chipmunk punk album? But we were, we were very up for it. And as it turns out, it sold over a million albums overnight. And then the people at CBS and NBC and ABC, they, you know, all of a sudden they wanted to have lunch.
17:26 Guy Raz? And was it relatively cheap to produce that record?
17:29 Speaker 01 Very inexpensive. I don't like to say cheap. I would say inexpensive.
17:34 Guy Raz? Wow. So you put that record out, it just sells like crazy and then what? And then television follows? Television companies start to call you?
17:43 Speaker 01 Well, right after that, as Janice mentioned, not only were the TV folks who we had gone to much more receptive and now interested, but it also gave us a chance to look at doing more music because obviously it had sold so well. So we were approached to do not only a Christmas album, but also, and we thought, okay, what would be, you know, the furthest thing away from this album? Because we didn't want to do a repeat of that. So Urban Cowboy had come out and we thought, you know what? Let's go to Nashville and record Urban Chipmunk. So we took songs from Kenny Rogers and the whole bunch of, Love a Rainy Night,
18:27 Speaker 01 Thank God I'm a Country Boy, all of these different songs. But one of the things that Janice wanted to do in that album was now create some dialogue, some stories.
18:38 Speaker 03 Just some personality and not just, you know, straight music.
18:41 Speaker 01 Not just songs, songs, songs, songs.
18:43 Guy Raz? Yeah.
18:43 Speaker 03 And so I said to Ross, so how do we do this? How did your dad do the voices and the dialogue? And he said, I have no idea.
18:53 Guy Raz? Yeah.
18:54 Speaker 01 I was playing Little League. What did I know?
18:56 Speaker 03 So I went back to the house and I played his father's tapes and I saw that he talked at half speed. And so I went back and I said, okay, this is what we do.
19:09 Guy Raz? So you're, you guys are recording this, like you're speaking very clearly and slowly. So then when you speed up the tape, it sounds like the Chipmunks.
19:19 Speaker 01 Right.
19:19 Speaker 03 Well, it sounds, it's the same speed as we speak, but it's at a higher pitch.
19:24 Speaker 01 Right.
19:25 Guy Raz? Just a logistical question. When you started to do the voices for the characters, how did you? Just give me a sense, like, give me a little bit of taste of... Obviously, everyone listening knows you are Dave, Ross. It's obvious. But like, how do you record Alvin? Like, just give me a line of how you would record Alvin.
19:43 Speaker 01 Well, I will do that, but I want to also say that Janice was just wonderful as Theodore right from the beginning, and I was still so tied to what my dad had done, which was very clear. And when my dad did Alvin, it was, "Hello, Dave. How are you doing today?" Very stilted, and it didn't feel real. So Janice would say, "Ross, you know what? Don't try and do an impersonation of your dad, either as David Seville or as Alvin or Simon. You know, loosen him up. Make it a little bit more your own." And so now, after all of these years, I've obviously gotten better.
20:26 Speaker 01 And so now Alvin is more fluid for me. And even though I have to talk more slowly, "Dave, listen, okay? I know you're gonna continue to talk about blah, blah, blah, whatever." Alvin!
20:40 Speaker 02 My name's not Alvin. It's Santa.
20:43 Speaker 01 All right, Santa. I'd like a word with you and your elves.
20:47 Speaker 03 And then, Guy, I would say, "Ross, slower."
20:50 Speaker 01 Right, right. "Dave, I remember what you said the last time, so could I please just leave?"
21:00 Speaker 02 Dave, can I talk to you a minute?
21:03 Speaker 04 There's nothing more to say, Alvin.
21:06 Speaker 02 Are you still mad at me, Dave?
21:08 Speaker 04 No.
21:09 Guy Raz? So, how did television actually then end up happening? Because it happened, I guess, in 1983. The Chipmunks cartoon comes back on TV.
21:18 Speaker 01 Right, but before that, Guy, in 1981, Janice and I had been taking around a Christmas idea, a Christmas special, from probably around '78 or so. So after Chipmunk Punk comes out and does so well, and then Urban Chipmunk, NBC... Said to us, hey, um, I know we told you, we thought that was a terrible idea and we didn't like the Chipmunks, but um, we now think with those two platinum albums, maybe that Christmas special is a good idea.
21:47 Guy Raz? Wow. Did you, did any executives that had previously rejected you, did you end up meeting with them and, and, and having, like, were they begging you to come back?
21:55 Speaker 01 Yes, and I'm not going to give you names, but many of those people that were on our list.
22:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, I did pull out my old list.
22:04 Guy Raz? So, so when they approached you and they said, we want to do a Christmas special, did you have a concept of, of what the cartoon would look like, how it would be animated? And did you already have that laid out or did you have to kind of figure that out?
22:15 Speaker 03 We didn't even, we had never written anything before and, and then when they, they said, so who do you see writing it? Ross said, we're gonna write it. And I looked at him across the room, I glared at him, like, what are you saying? And, and again, because out of necessity, we wrote it. And then, no, we didn't have a look, we didn't have, we, the voices, we still weren't experts at, and, yeah.
22:46 Guy Raz? How did you even know what to do? I mean, obviously, you know, you're both super smart and talented, but I mean, you're creating an animation studio overnight, you're, you're standing up an animation studio, which by the way, in 1983 was very expensive because it's still hand drawn stuff, right?
23:03 Speaker 01 Right, exactly.
23:04 Speaker 03 Well, Ross and I have done everything, everything we've ventured into, we've known nothing about. So, it's the-
23:11 Speaker 01 We start from stupid.
23:12 Speaker 03 We start from stupid. It's the hardest way and the best way to learn. And you just go step by step. Okay, we need to create characters. Okay, we need to know what this world looks like.
23:24 Speaker 01 And we were really very fortunate because some of the great animators from Warner Brothers,
23:34 Speaker 01 Including Chuck Jones and Phil Monroe and Virgil Ross and these guys who had done the greatest Bugs Bunny cartoons in the 40s and 50s were available and they weren't being used. Wow. And Janice and I hired all of them to make the Christmas special, A Chipmunk Christmas.
23:55 Speaker 02 After that Christmas special on NBC, clearly it was a success because NBC cut a deal with you. What was that first deal? Was it a one season of Alvin and the Chipmunks that they committed to?
24:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was always that sort of wonderful first series deal. So it was, it could be as long as five years, but it was one year at a time. And we got very little money for it. Back in those days, it was like $210,000 for a half hour of shows. So there wasn't much-
24:38 Speaker 02 And that was supposed to cover all your costs?
24:40 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. So, and we were used- And we were putting our own money into, always putting our own- Oh, yeah. We were used to going into our own pocket.
24:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:54 Speaker 02 Okay, so the show launches in 1983. This was on Saturday mornings, of course.
24:58 Speaker 01 That's right. And we were against Bugs Bunny on ABC and CBS who didn't want us. We had gone to them first because they said, "Why do we need the chipmunks? We've got Charlie Brown and Snoopy."
25:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:11 Speaker 01 And we said, "Well, you know, you could have two. We could have Snoopy." Anyway, so we turned out to be against poor Charlie Brown and Snoopy. And the Chipmunk series was a giant hit right from the beginning.
25:27 Speaker 02 I remember.
25:44 Guy Raz? So I mean, it's interesting because you know, you think about, I mean, just as a consumer, right? You're thinking about like Mickey Mouse and Alvin and Bugs Bunny and the Peanuts gang, and they're all great. Like, we love them all. We have these warm feelings about them. But actually, from the perspective of the creators of these of these characters, like, you're-- these are competitors, right?
26:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, they-- go ahead, Jan.
26:07 Speaker 03 No, I guess. I never see them as competitors.
26:10 Guy Raz? You didn't like want to just crush Mickey?
26:12 Speaker 03 No. I didn't want to crush him. I wanted to put my arms around him.
26:17 Guy Raz? All right.
26:18 Speaker 01 We are-- yeah, we honestly always felt-- it was like our conversation with CBS when they said, well, we've already got, you know, Snoopy and Charlie Brown. We always thought that good shows or good characters can coexist. We didn't feel like we needed to go to war with anybody. We just wanted to create something that was unique to us.
26:40 Speaker 03 But Guy, to be honest, you know, if the executive says in a rude way, "Why do I need you?" Yes, then we want to crush the executive.
26:51 Guy Raz? Yeah, you want to crush it, right?
26:52 Speaker 03 But we don't want to crush, you know, Snoopy. We want to crush the executive.
27:00 Guy Raz? In just a moment, a deal gone bad that put the Chipmunks on life support, and how Ross and Janice revived the franchise. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.
27:41 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1985, and Ross and Janice get through the first season of Alvin and the Chipmunks for NBC. And even though the show is reaching huge audiences, Ross and Janice aren't making a whole lot of money at this point. Remember, the deal they signed with NBC was for $200,000 for the whole season. But what they did have was something much more valuable: the rights to the Chipmunks. I mean, you guys own everything.
28:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:16 Guy Raz? You own the master recordings, you own the animations, you own the characters. How is it possible that NBC didn't say, hey, if you want to deal with us, we own the rights to this thing and all the licensing?
28:30 Speaker 01 Well, because my dad had, not only, as you mentioned, set that up, he was the first songwriter who not only owned the publishing, but also the master recordings. And that's what, interestingly, when we met Barry Gordy years later, he said, you know, I learned a very valuable thing. When I was writing songs, I decided to found Motown because I wanted to own the master recordings the way your dad did. So it was, my dad was really, not only really this great mix of creativity, but also very really smart about business.
29:12 Speaker 01 And so I knew that, as my dad had mentioned, there was creating wonderful product, but then there was holding on to the rights to that same thing.
29:22 Guy Raz? But NBC said, we will make this into a cartoon for you. And you guys had been pitching this for, at that point, six years. I mean, if NBC would have said to you, but these are our terms, I mean, how, would you have just walked away?
29:38 Speaker 01 We would have, because what we said is, look, we'll produce it, we'll make sure we get the financing together, we'll get a license fee from you. We brought in Kellogg's, so Kellogg's was our sponsor. And Janice and I wrote the shows and then we produced it. And after the first season, they came to Janice and I, they said, okay, we'd like to expand it. Now we want you guys to do an hour, not a half an hour. And we just said, we can't even make a half hour we're proud of. So, and we can't work any longer unless you make more than seven days in the week. So we're going to turn it down.
30:16 Speaker 03 And she said, no, Janice, nobody turns down more shows.
30:21 Speaker 01 But we did.
30:23 Guy Raz? So you are, you're making these shows for NBC. You're obviously just not making any real money from, from the shows because it's going to pay the production costs, but you are getting all this visibility. So, but you're also running a business. At what point did you guys sit down and say, you know what? This is a business. Like, let's think about how to make this into something really, really big. What was the, what was it that you started to think about?
30:49 Speaker 03 You know, Guy, we were just sitting at home all the time. So we didn't, and you see the numbers, you see the ratings, but they don't really translate into people. You know, you can imagine, but you just don't get it.
31:03 Speaker 01 Back in those days, Guy, we were getting like 40% of the audience was watching.
31:07 Speaker 03 Like 20 million a week, or 15 to 20 million a week. So finally, we got an invite, we did a live show, and it was at Madison Square Garden.
31:16 Guy Raz? You just had people dress up in chipmunks?
31:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, we did the voices and did, designed the costumes and got a story together. And we didn't have time to tour it, but we go to Madison Square Garden. And when we went to the box office, the guy said, well, I didn't know you were coming. I sold your tickets. It was sold out.
31:37 Guy Raz? Oh, you were going to, to, to see the show.
31:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, to see the show.
31:40 Guy Raz? Right, yes.
31:41 Speaker 03 And he's, and I said, but we are, we are the chip. Anyway, he let us sit in the aisle. And for the first time, we saw fans. We saw kids waving chipmunk banners and screaming, and the place was filled.
31:57 Guy Raz? Wow.
31:57 Speaker 03 And it was such a moment for us that we'll never forget. It was like, oh, my gosh, there are, there are people, there are kids. They, they like the show, they like the characters.
32:15 Guy Raz? So, I mean, your business really became The Chipmunks. I mean, it was the television show on NBC, it was records, it was merchandising live shows, and I guess like syndication, right?
32:27 Speaker 01 Yeah. And this is one of the funny business stories, and I found it interesting, only because later on it turned out to be such a windfall that we did not know about. But they said, "Look, what's going to happen is that CBS Viacom is going to run your dad's old shows, The Advent Show, against us because now that you're bringing The Chipmunks back so successfully with the albums and the Christmas special and now the new series, you have to get Viacom to not do it on Saturday morning, and we want you to offer them the syndication rights for the new series if they'll just not run up against us." And so Janice and I, not knowing the value of syndication, went to Viacom CBS and said,
33:11 Speaker 01 "Okay, if you just won't run against our new shows on NBC, we'll give you the syndication rights to our new series." And they, very full of themselves, said, "No, we're not going to do that deal." And then a couple of years later, we sold those rights for $25 million.
33:30 Speaker 03 We found out it was worth something.
33:32 Guy Raz? Wow. And that was where the money was?
33:35 Speaker 01 Which we did not know.
33:36 Speaker 03 Which we were going to give away.
33:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:38 Guy Raz? And was that syndication, I mean, so the syndication rights were yours. You didn't have to share that with NBC?
33:43 Speaker 01 No, not at NBC didn't get a piece at all.
33:48 Guy Raz? So, $25 million is a tremendous amount of money now, but in 1985, even more money. I mean, what did that mean? Did that, I mean, I think anybody listening would just assume that that was it. You guys were set for life.
34:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, first of all, it was very exciting, and it was just a number. I was always a kid, even when I was watching The Price is Right as a six-year-old, I knew what the dishwasher would go for, or the, and my mom would always say, "How do you know this? You've not bought dishwashers." But I always had a sense of... What a price for something was going to be. So I had just set that price and I didn't change it until we got it. And Janice and I so wanted to make something we were really proud of, not just something that was successful, because the TV show was obviously tremendously successful, but we were never able to give it the kind of quality that we had hoped to do.
34:48 Speaker 01 So, yes, you would think we would be set, but because we always wanted to do something we'd also be proud of, we took most of that money and made an animated feature, The Chipmunk Adventure, which came out in 87.
35:05 Guy Raz? And that movie did pretty well, right?
35:07 Speaker 01 It did well, but we didn't, at least in that initial time, we didn't get our money back back in those days, because unfortunately, we signed on with a distributor that was going to put X number of dollars into marketing and distribute. We were, they spent less than $900,000 marketing the movie and including the prints and advertising. So it did, it did okay, but it did not remotely get us our money back until many DVD sales later.
35:39 Speaker 03 Ross wrote a little article on that experience, making the movie called The Agony and The Agony.
35:49 Speaker 01 Hard to find a bright spot in that one.
35:56 Guy Raz? Here's what I'm curious about, because the show airs on NBC and you are doing original, new episodes until 1990, and then I guess it's in syndication. And then you guys decide to move on. You basically leave NBC and cut a deal with Universal to bring the show back. So what was that about?
36:17 Speaker 01 So one of the things that they wanted to do was create their own Mickey Mouse. And they had had Woody Woodpecker for years, but Woody didn't have the sort of resonance for generations the way Alvin did and certainly didn't the way Mickey Mouse did. And they had seen that when we had gone head to head, whether it was with Mickey Mouse in an album, or a TV show, or what have you, that the chipmunks not only held their own, but did very, very well and usually came out on top. So Universal loved that, gee, that Alvin could be our Mickey Mouse. And so the idea then was they were going to create an animation unit for us, and Janice and I were going to run that.
37:02 Speaker 01 And we would, of course, not only do more chipmunk stuff, but a lot of other things that we had showed them that we could do.
37:08 Guy Raz? Wow.
37:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, we were going to be in their theme parks, and that part actually did happen, but it was going to be this whole smorgasbord of opportunity. And so for Janice and for me, that was like, oh, my gosh, this sounds fantastic.
37:23 Guy Raz? Yeah. Did you have to give up some of your ownership for that kind of deal?
37:27 Speaker 01 They bought a 25% share at that point in time. And that, for the opportunity, for what felt like a really exciting opportunity to grow the business in a much larger way, felt like a great thing.
37:44 Guy Raz? Did the money was going to help you scale?
37:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And they were going to be also putting money into development and production of all of these different things. And then shortly after we signed that deal, all the folks who wanted to do that were gone.
38:04 Guy Raz? What do you mean they're gone?
38:05 Speaker 01 They all left. And so now you are...
38:08 Guy Raz? No!
38:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, we wound up in a place that wasn't the same as we thought it was when we came in.
38:15 Guy Raz? So what do you mean? Like, all the people who signed the deal with Universal were gone, but you still had this deal with Universal. I mean, they would still have the commitments to, I mean, I guess presumably to make movies and to do all kinds of stuff. So why wouldn't you just do it?
38:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, we certainly wanted to do it, but you'd have to ask them why they didn't wind up doing much of any of it.
38:36 Speaker 03 You know, somebody new comes in and they have a different vision.
38:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, so those were not our happy years, and we wound up leaving that.
38:43 Guy Raz? But what I understand is... What happened? Did they stop answering your calls? Because you were presumably working on ideas and just were you pitching it and they were saying no? Or were they just ignoring you? What was the dynamic?
38:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, it was a combination of it started out very excited and then as some of the folks who had brought us in, you know, would leave, then it'd be harder to get through to them. Then it would become no return calls and yeah, it was just you felt very much like the orphaned child that was brought in to be, you know, the favorite son and then all of a sudden you aren't.
39:28 Guy Raz? So did Alvin and the Chipmunks basically drop off the map at that point?
39:32 Speaker 01 Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. And so that's why we said to them, listen, we really, we want to do this, that and the other. We've got a lot of opportunity, if not here at Universal. There's all kinds of interest outside, so we can do, folks in Japan want to put chipmunk stores together. Folks in Europe want us to make more serious, so we'll just do all of those things.
39:56 Guy Raz? And they said?
39:56 Speaker 01 And they said, no, no, we can't, we don't want to have too many cooks in the kitchen. And I said, there's no cook in the kitchen. So there's not a pot, not a pan, there's nobody, there's no cooks here.
40:10 Guy Raz? So you guys were just hanging around, pulling your hair out, trying to get things off the ground and nothing?
40:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it wasn't at all the kind of opportunity that we had hoped for. And finally, in 2000 and in 2001, we were able to go our separate way and...
40:27 Guy Raz? You sued them to get back your company?
40:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had to, you know, you, unfortunately, you have to protect your characters and sometimes you try...
40:39 Speaker 03 When you've exhausted every other, you know, because you don't want to go into this. I'm telling everybody, you don't want to go into this until you've exhausted all other options and you're up against the wall.
40:51 Speaker 01 But once you're there, you just have to be committed to that. We always were.
40:56 Speaker 03 And we stand, we do, we really do stand very united on that front.
41:01 Guy Raz? But does it, does it, I mean, it's got to eat at you. It's like, it's got to be something that you just can't get out of your head. That must affect your sleep and just your thought process. And it just must become all consuming.
41:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you don't understand why.
41:14 Speaker 01 And what we've realized is that logic does not play much of a part in any of it. And that's the thing that's so strange to us because it's like, OK, hold on a minute. You have no interest in this. We are dedicating our entire lives to it. We should be able to find a way to separate this out and go on our merry way.
41:39 Speaker 03 And I tend to try to put something in a different perspective. I say to Ross, this is such a miserable experience that let's get something out of it. Let's make, you know, this is, this is sort of fascinating, right?
41:52 Speaker 01 I didn't find it fascinating personally, but Janice always does.
41:57 Speaker 03 But I, no, I, I have to, I have to put it in a different category than miserable. And so I think, OK, well, I'm going to learn what this process is like. And how do I make this as good as I can make it?
42:10 Guy Raz? That's a very healthy approach to lawsuits, I have to say. I'm inspired, I'm inspired. I, I'm just wondering, though, I mean, that, from what, from what I've read, the, it was only settled really in 2004. So from that 2000 to 2004 period, were you basically in like suspended limbo, like?
42:28 Speaker 01 No, no, no, no, because, because 2001 was really the end of it. The 2004 part was just, that's when the last payment that we had to make to them was actually done.
42:41 Speaker 03 To get our company back.
42:43 Speaker 01 Right, so now, now, now, now it was, now it was about how do we resurrect the franchise again? After it basically.
42:54 Guy Raz? Fell off the map.
42:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, went into hibernation.
42:57 Guy Raz? How, how much did you have to pay them to buy back your ownership?
43:00 Speaker 01 Uh, two and a half million dollars for their.
43:02 Guy Raz? So that's nothing because they paid you guys a lot more, right?
43:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
43:07 Guy Raz? OK, so you guys get out of that deal and then you're free. And I guess it was at, at this point that you signed this multi movie deal with Fox, right?
43:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:17 Guy Raz? But by then, the Chipmunks had been kind of like off the radar for lots of years. So did that affect your ability to call the shots in that negotiation?
43:26 Speaker 01 Well, you know, not totally, although you don't ever necessarily get the kind of deal that you want to have. But we were very clear that we would, as we have always been, be involved in every aspect and...
43:40 Speaker 03 And we say, right from the start, listen, we are very proprietary. If you don't want to work with people like this, please, you know, don't because it will get, you know...
43:53 Guy Raz? From the outset, you'll say to people...
43:54 Speaker 03 From the outset, always.
43:55 Guy Raz? This is what we're like, and it's gonna be a pain in your ass. We want you to know.
43:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, and I don't think we are. I think we're very reasonable and protective of the characters. No, I mean, if we were a pain in the ass, I would say so, but I think, but we're protective of the characters.
44:15 Guy Raz? So is it three movies you made with Fox now?
44:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:19 Guy Raz? And I think it's in the first one where the villain is this record executive. It's like chin beard, goatee, I think.
44:26 Speaker 01 David Cross.
44:27 Guy Raz? David Cross. And is that, is that, is that like a kind of an unsubtle, you know, representation of your own experiences in this industry?
44:38 Speaker 01 Well, I'll tell you, one of the stories with our music situation was that in 1982, we are with a record company, and I won't go into the specifics of who or, you know, we're gonna protect the guilty here.
44:55 Guy Raz? Feel free. Feel free to just spill your guts.
45:01 Speaker 01 So we're recording, and the album comes out, and we are told by the record executive, Ross, Janice, I want you guys to take the Chipmunks on the road. These are the seven cities we want you to go to. Travel across the country to these seven cities and make this album a hit in these seven cities. And if you do that, we will give you a big national promotion. Great, okay. We hit the road. And I won't get into all of the crazy stuff that happens, but in any event, at the end of the tour, we in fact make the album a hit in each one of the seven cities. We
45:43 Speaker 01 come back to the record executive, so excited after a pretty bruising couple of weeks.
45:49 Speaker 03 Was that all it was?
45:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:51 Speaker 03 Couple of-
45:52 Speaker 01 Felt like 12 years. In any event, we're all excited and want to now talk about the national plans that they're gonna do. And this is a quote, and it's, so it explains why David Cross is, Ian is that character. The record executive tells Janice and me, "Well, we're not actually going to do the national release and the big marketing part." I said, "Well, wait, wait." I said, "You told us that if we..." He said, "If you don't have it in writing, you don't have it."
46:26 Guy Raz? Wow.
46:27 Speaker 01 So that was a brutal lesson.
46:30 Speaker 03 Wow. We've learned a lot of lessons over the four decades we've been doing this.
46:35 Speaker 01 Full of lessons.
46:36 Guy Raz? You, these movies that Fox made, killed it. They did extremely well, right? I guess they generated almost a billion dollars in revenue?
46:48 Speaker 01 Well, over a b- no, no, yeah, they, their box office is about a billion 300 million.
46:54 Guy Raz? Wow.
46:55 Speaker 01 And if you include the DVD sales, it's over $2 billion in revenue.
47:01 Guy Raz? Wow, I'm one of those DVD buyers. You can, you can send me a thank you card right here on here.
47:08 Speaker 01 Well, unfortunately, Fox will send you the thank you card, because we get about two cents per DVD.
47:13 Guy Raz? Exactly. Like, you get about two, you know, you get a tiny cut of that 1.3 billion. So inevitably, it's going to lead to some kind of clash. It seems like it's just the way these deals are set up. It's like if all of a sudden, it goes well beyond anybody's expectations. They're delighted, but you guys get screwed.
47:31 Speaker 01 Well, the economics of it wouldn't have been the frustration for us because when we make a deal-
47:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, we stick to it.
47:38 Speaker 01 We live by the deal, so that isn't the frustration for us. The frustration for us is wanting to tell a certain kind of story with reflecting certain kinds of scenes and dialogue and so forth for the characters that we have spent four decades with. That's honestly where the issue would be, not how the economics break down.
48:08 Guy Raz? I know that you guys filed a lawsuit against Fox because of some of this frustration. I know you can't talk about all the details of it because it was settled. But I mean, once you have legal action against this company that essentially you work with and then you settle it, you still have to work with them after.
48:27 Speaker 01 Right.
48:27 Guy Raz? I mean, there must be some bad blood. So how does that, how do you interact with folks at Fox? Is it like perfectly cordial and normal?
48:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, everybody puts on their big boy shorts and gets to work.
48:45 Guy Raz? You know, we have occasionally on the show interviewed husband and wife teams who have built amazing businesses. Kate and Andy Spade.
48:55 Speaker 01 Sure.
48:55 Guy Raz? Melissa and Doug, you know, of Melissa and Doug. And you guys, and I'm always really impressed when I talk to people who've been married for 37 years and created an incredible business. And you obviously clearly like not only love each other, but you really respect each other's judgment and you've carved out different roles for yourself. What's, is it just like serendipitous that it works? Or do you actually-
49:20 Speaker 01 No, there's actually, there's actually a really simple approach that we have, and, and, and this was right from the beginning because of our respect for one another. If Janice had a different point of view, and she felt more strongly about it than I did, then I would defer to her. If, conversely, I had a stronger feeling about it than she did, she would defer to me. But right now, because she's writing the shows and directing them and designing them and so forth, she really is the driving force of the show, and I'm thrilled, you know, to play a part with Alvin and Simon and Dave and-
50:00 Speaker 03 He gets frustrated with me when I wake him up at 2:00 in the morning and say, "Ross, Ross, I, I think you could do line 27 better."
50:07 Speaker 01 No, not now!
50:11 Speaker 03 But we do respect each other. We work really well together. And I've thought about that, too, about husbands and wives. And I, I, I think that it either works, and I could be wrong about this, but I think it either works or it doesn't work. If a couple is committed to, you know, going into therapy and really working on their communications, maybe two people that wouldn't normally be able to work together could work it out. But, but we, we just naturally work very, very well together.
50:37 Guy Raz? I mean, you, you guys scaled this concept in a way that would probably be unimaginable to your dad. I mean, he, he, he, obviously, he did well. He made lots of money off, of Alvin and the Chipmunks and was able to build a great life for his family. But you guys took it to a stratospheric level, a completely different level, and it really had the ashes of this, this concept. I mean, what, what do you think he would have made of, of, of Alvin and the Chipmunks today and what it's become?
51:06 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, he would be so proud. But, but also because my dad had a very limited attention span on things, I'm sure he would say, "What the hell are you guys doing 40 years later?"
51:21 Speaker 03 But I also have to tell you this serendipitous story. We were, in the 80s, we would have to drive down, we'd finally moved to Santa Barbara, and we would drive- Down to LA to do pick up lines when because the show was going to be on two days later. And we do our whoa, oof, oof, and whatever else we had to fill in for the story. And we drove back. It was probably three o'clock in the morning and I just, you know, automatically turn on the TV to just unwind. And Ross said, oh, my God, my dad, I just can't imagine because the show wasn't coming out the way we wanted. And Ross said, oh, my gosh, I can't imagine what my dad is thinking.
52:01 Speaker 03 And I said, no, no, no, your dad would be very proud at how hard we're working, how how much we're trying. And on the television was his father on the, what is it?
52:15 Speaker 01 It's good. It's, yeah, it's a Cecil B. Demille Greatest Show on Earth. And my dad is in the audience applauding. Wow.
52:24 Speaker 03 And we looked at the tele. I couldn't believe it. And we started to cry. But that was, that was serendipitous, I have to say.
52:39 Guy Raz? Janice Karman and Ross Bagdasarian are the duo behind Alvin and the Chipmunks. By the way, the Chipmunks were actually named after executives of the original record label. Alvin Bennett, Simon Waronaker, and Theodore Keep were the chief executives of Liberty Records in 1958. Do, um, do people ever call you Dave?
53:06 Speaker 01 You know what? Sometimes, sometimes they do. Or they'll say, you know, you sound so much like that David Seville character. Did anyone ever tell you that?
53:18 Guy Raz? And then, and then you gotta do it, right?
53:22 Speaker 01 Okay, well, and hopefully I'm not going to burn the mic up here doing this, but Alvin.
53:39 Guy Raz? Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today, we're updating a story we first ran last year. It begins with Alex Vandewark of Chico, California. And here's his question.
53:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, so it's, have you ever mixed concrete before?
53:55 Guy Raz? I personally have not mixed concrete before, but Alex has mixed a ton of it, especially when he was a teenager, helping out with small jobs at his dad's construction company.
54:06 Speaker 05 And typically, what you do is you grab a bag of concrete, you put it in the wheelbarrow, you break it open, you throw water in there, and you use a shovel to mix it around. And then you wheel that wheelbarrow wherever you need, and you pour it.
54:18 Guy Raz? And when you do this over and over, it can get to be a real pain.
54:23 Speaker 05 It takes too long, it's messy, and then pouring it is just too challenging to do. My dad and I would say, OK, we need a better way to mix this stuff.
54:33 Guy Raz? And so one day, kind of on the fly, really, Alex and his dad ditched the wheelbarrow, and they decided to use a lightweight tarp instead. They poured the cement and the water onto the tarp, and then held it up between them.
54:46 Speaker 05 And instead of using a shovel or any other tool, I would just use these four corners, and I would kind of pick one side up at a time and effectively fold the pile of concrete and water over itself. And it would mix very quickly. And then you could just sort of pick up the tarp from one side and pour it in to where you needed it.
55:06 Guy Raz? OK, so it's a pretty basic hack. And Alex really didn't think much of it. But a few years later, when he was taking business classes at college, he said to his dad, you know, maybe we can make a thicker tarp to mix cement and then sell it.
55:19 Speaker 05 But for us, it was like this really difficult leap. And, you know, how do we create something that does what we want it to do without knowing how to create it? We didn't really, we're not experts in the textile industry. We knew how to mix concrete, and that's it.
55:36 Guy Raz? So in order to market a mixing mat that people would actually want to buy, Alex had to invent a tarp that would form kind of a bowl when you held it. So the cement wouldn't spill out. And then the tarp had to be tough and waterproof. And even after he and his dad found just the right material.
55:54 Speaker 05 It's called a polyester denier blend, and it's coated with PVC.
55:58 Guy Raz? Even after they found that, they still had to find a way to make the actual mat.
56:03 Speaker 05 I was calling people in China and Mexico, trying to just see like, OK, who can make this? And I thought it would be easy. And that took years to do.
56:14 Guy Raz? Well, they finally got the mat manufactured a few years ago. But when they pitched it to their dream retailer, Home Depot, Home Depot said no.
56:24 Speaker 05 The funny thing is, I spent probably a year learning the same lesson over and over, which is you're not gonna get into Home Depot if you're a nobody.
56:34 Guy Raz? So this is where a brand new business has to pivot. And that's exactly what Alex did. He figured maybe he could get churches and charities to buy the mixed mats and then donate them to places that really needed them.
56:48 Speaker 05 You know, a huge amount of people that are impoverished in rural areas of the world that have absolutely nothing and they live on dirt floors.
56:55 Guy Raz? And Alex says several donors have already bought the mats to help rebuild after natural disasters in places like Haiti and Mexico.
57:02 Speaker 05 You know, it started off as this low-tech product we just wanted to sell to make some money. And it has transformed into an opportunity to help people.
57:14 Guy Raz? That's Alex Vandewerk, co-owner of Up LLC, which makes the Mixmat. And he says the company's revenue has multiplied 10 times since we spoke with them last year. They've also partnered with a nonprofit called Bright Light. And starting in April, they'll be using the Mixmat to build homes and schools in developing countries. If you want to learn more about Mixmat or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org.
57:50 Guy Raz? And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected] . And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Ramtin Arablouei, who also composed the music. Thanks also to J.C. Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Mia Venkat. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.
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