The Chipmunks: Ross Bagdasarian Jr. & Janice Karman

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2017

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 in our postscript "How You Built That," how Daniel Clark-Webster and his three friends came up with RompHim – a company specializing in male rompers. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:33.0	We are told by the Record Executive.
0:36.0	Ross Janice, I want you guys to take the chipmunks on the road.
0:40.0	We want you to take them. These are the seven cities we want you to go to,
0:45.0	and make this album a hit in these seven cities, and if you do that, we will give you a big national promotion.
0:53.0	We hit the road. We in fact make the album a hit in each one of the seven cities.
0:59.0	We come back to the Record Executive.
1:02.0	The Record Executive tells Janice and me,
1:05.0	well, we're not actually going to do the national release and the big marketing.
1:11.0	I said, well, wait, I said, you told us that if you don't have it in writing, you don't have it.
1:25.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:27.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:37.0	I'm Guy Ross and I today show how a husband and wife team built a billion dollar brand around three singing chipmunks.
1:55.0	If you were to build, say, a pantheon or a Mount Rushmore of Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s,
2:01.0	a statue to Alvin and the chipmunks would be right there alongside the smurfs, the gummy bears, inspector gadget.
2:08.0	It was one of NBC's biggest hits, three singing rodents.
2:13.0	Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and their exasperated but kind manager slash foster dad Dave Sivill.
	...

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