Sorry, still in the midst of crushing post-holiday depression; someone will be right with you.
In the meantime!: the other day, I was listening to Patton Oswalt talking about his favorite Christmas memory, namely listening to the Chipmunks Christmas song on vinyl at super-slow speed (which he said sounded like some middle-aged men singing in monotone to an angry demon) and his description of it made me laugh so hard that I quite literally flew backwards off a moving treadmill into a concrete wall. My serious injury was ameliorated only by this, some stalwart’s actual recording of what he describes:
http://centripetalnotion.com/media/audio/TheChipmunkSong-NightmareEdition.mp3
Enjoy, as I did! (This mp3 answers a question I have quite literally been wondering about my whole life.)
January 5th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Danny had a record of the original Star Wars and he used to play portions of it at 33 rpm and argue that Jabba the Hut was in the original.
Turned out there was a kernal of truth involved.
Thank you for sharing that. I laughed very hard.
But I still don’t understand how they did it.
You want to give your explanation?
k
January 5th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
It had to be as involved as splitting the atom, now that I hear it like this. They had to record the music at regular speed, obviously; figure out how fast they had to speed up the voices to make them cute and intelligible; play the music back slowed down to that same degree; add in “Dave” at the same speed as the music, reacting with adequate timing to chipmunks that aren’t there yet; to say nothing of the fact that I’m pretty sure a couple of those chipmunks are the same guy. Jonas Salk didn’t do that much math.