Alvin and the Chipmunks

Alvin and the Chipmunks were created by Ross Bagdasarian in 1958, with female sidekicks The Chipettes added a few years later - all in the blissful time before pantsless couples of anthropomorphic cartoon animals were ruined by the den of collective unforgivable perversion known as "the Internet," as our own Cracked staffer records here.

The Chipmunks' first hit was "What to Do," also known as "That Fucking Witch Doctor Song" or "Jesus Christ, Turn That Shit Down." The song was recorded in 1958 with Bagdasarian singing just the normal-pitch section, then again in 1959 with Badasarian doing all the voice work including a duet with his own sped-up voice for the Witch Doctor's lines. A second song, "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)," was recorded in 1959, then again in 1960 - proving that Ross Bagdasarian really fucking loves chipmunks.

Boy, this guy was really NUTS for those chipmunks! Get it? GET IT?!

That year, the Chipmunks appeared as cutely crudely-crafted hand puppets on The Ed Sullivan Show singing the Christmas song - the last time they were genuinely adorable, before the Hollywood marketing whore-a-thon we see today began.

After years performing variations on the same "Alvin has wacky idea, Simon offers begrudging assistance, Theodore's antics send things comically awry, the audience dies a little on the inside" formula, the creators decided it was time to leave their repititious, predictable television gags behind and create some repititious, predictable movie gags to really rake in the millions. Jason Lee, who wasn't busy at the time and deservedly so, was hired to play "adoptive" father David Seville - as he had to play a disheveled, broken shell of a failed human being who had so little left he was willing to accept help from anyone who could improve his career, he was a natural fit. This movie is also written up in one of the worst Wikipedia articles ever, which is annoying because hell if the Cracked.com staff actually sat through this bullshit. We're far too busy diligently researching the 10 most butt references per second in music history to stoop to that level, so lets cut to the chase.

Critical response to the film was, to put it politely, "mixed."

As in, some critics self-destructed faster than others.

Acclaimed film critic Leonard Malton said the Chipmunks movie "enraged me to the point that I vomited blood out my asshole so hard it caused a sonic boom."

New York Times fine arts' columnist A.O. Scott was left curled in the fetal position at the back of the movie theater sobbing for hours. This chipmunk-shaped turd racked up a 27/100 on Rotten Tomatoes, a 39 on Metacritic and $114 million at the box office, proving in a truly George Bush-like fashion that grades don't matter to success. As if having the three CGI rodents popping a collective squat onto Funkytown to the delights of its legions of furry fandom wasn't enough, a sequel was planned even before the first was secreted onto theaters.

Pardon me... a Squeakquel.

Betty Thomas spent four years getting a fine arts degree from a prestigious film school. She worked for years as an artist, struggling to get her work out to the public. She then decided, at age sixty-one, that her one artistic contribution to humanity, the one new, novel, original thing she wanted to show the world would be Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Fucking Squeakquel.

The theological "problem of evil," which posits that some things we see in the world around us defy the possibility of a loving God, presented here in movie poster form.

To give you an idea of the quality of this movie, the guy who directed the last one apparently didn't think the script was up to the high artistic quality of the first, and so left. Said first guy, Tim Hill, also directed Garfield 2: A Tale of Two Kitties before calling it quits on the Chipmunks sequel. That's how good this movie is.

This movie literally doubled the merchandising capacity of the first by introducing three female mutant rodent freaks, sure to pollute and confuse the sexual development of toddlers everywhere, and further confuse the Furry population's bestial lusts, too. However, considering the hollow, dead-inside gazes of the CGI characters:

Holding objects shaped like that came only too naturally to them.

These things are actually the first part of the 21st-century update that are slightly less creepy than the "innocent" cartoon originals. These aired in the 1980s:

"Oh, about three pixels' worth" should NOT be an acceptable answer to the question, "how much cleavage should we give these cartoon animals designed for children?

And because if you've read this article all the way through it has to have been because you were expecting a horde of pithy aspersions unto the Furry community... this took one page of Google Image results.

You know, it really only takes one winking anthropomorphic creature per photo to creep us the hell out.

No word yet on whether Betty Thomas plans on giving a threequel a go, pointing out that using "Squeakquel" for the second has already exhaused the writers' limited options for putting a pun in the title of the third, pretty much the series' only novel selling point.

Yeah, they're making a third. Oh, please - you saw the third <i>Transformers</i> movie, so don't get all indignant.

True to its fontal-lobe-crushingly puntacular title, the movie involves a bunch of CGI rats winding up on an island.

One-third of the movie is just a chipmunk version of Kevin Federline making the "rock out" hand sign.

Given our past experience with works involving deserted islands, we predict the Chipmunks will befriend a volleyball, survive with the help of a friendly racial caricature named after a day of the week, and then start killing each other over a conch shell and a dead pig.

Pictured: Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Chipettes, and lovable jivemaster Friday.

Except in this version, you're the one spending an eternity in purgatory.