By Fred Topel | Image property of 20th Century Fox
Space Chimps
Space Chimps sounds like a no-brainer. Monkeys in space = comic gold. For writer/director Kirk De Micco, the development was a little more substantial than that.
Kirk De Micco on Space Chimps
"I was watching one of my favorite films, The Right Stuff, and there was this scene in there where Chuck Yeager says, 'Do you think a monkey knows he's sitting on top of a rocket?'" De Micco recalled. "I said well, what if he did? Then I went to John Williams, the producer, and we pitched it. I brought the Life magazine article from 1961 or Ham sitting on the front and used that as my pitch and basically said if it was like his grandson sort of, more of a Tommy Boy type version of The Right Stuff. That's where that started, one of my favorites."
That's about where the accuracy ended. There were no research trips to chimpanzee habitats. "For animation, we had visual reference which we would use but actually, we made this movie in Vancouver, Canada where there's not a lot of chimps in Canada actually. Seattle is the nearest chimps in zoos so we did not. We just used visual reference for animation."
In addition to talking monkeys, Space Chimps features alien races on foreign planets, including an adorable singing little creature named Kilowatt.
"Kilowatt, well, Kristen [Chenowith] really invented. That was only a being until she came along and put that in there and it just came alive. It brings such an energy to the middle of the film that it is completely out there. The funny thing is you don't really know if she's the only alien that is outside the other aliens because she'd been outcast because she's so kooky or because she's just been run away because she's a hero. Yeah, she brings something special to the little team."
Space Chimps is rated PG for the whole family, but there are things for the parents in there. "I think there are certainly more surrealistic and silly that we might understand or might be a little more reference to the genre which unless you've seen a lot of these movies, you probably wouldn't get."
Space Chimps
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