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Hangin' With Archives
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Get Launched with theSpace Chimps!by Lynn Barker
Astrochimps Ham and Luna fall in love during a trip to another planet to retrieve a lost space probe and end up saving the planet from an evil dictator. We wanted to know what it is like to go on a space adventure without ever leaving the recording booth…. AGW: How did you originally come up with the story idea for this? Was it based on the real astronaut chimp named Ham from the 1960’s? Kirk: Yeah I basically was watching one of my favorite films The Right Stuff and there was this scene in there where Chuck Yeager says ‘you think a monkey doesn’t sit on top of a rocket?’ and I said ‘well, what if he did?’ and I went to the producer and pitched it and brought the Life Magazine article from 1961 with Ham on the front and said what if this were his grandson? AGW: Andy, how does it feel to join other “Saturday Night Live” stars like Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy who have done voices in popular animated movies? Andy: It feels great! That sounds about right I guess. Ask me again, how it feels when we’re doing Space Chimps 12 I guess! AGW: Did you two record your voices alone in a studio or get to be in the same room? Cheryl: Alone but once in a while, I’d get to hear Andy’s voice or other voices and that was fun. Andy: Right, sometimes they will pump in the recorded voices (of the other actors) so you can bounce off of them, like how a line was recorded. That was helpful. Kirk: Yeah, for some scenes we’d put Andy’s voice into Cheryl’s headphones so she could play off of it. Cheryl: I had his voice in my head. That’ll make you a little crazy! Andy: Sometimes I would call Cheryl at nights and on weekends and say lines from the movie to kind of keep her on her toes! Cheryl: It’s a long process. AGW: Andy did your background in stand-up comedy help you with playing Ham? Did you ad-lib a lot while recording?
AGW: And Cheryl, did being on TV in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” help you a bit? Cheryl: Yeah it did. I think, when you’re doing animation, it takes a great deal of imagination because you’re just in this little [recording] booth by yourself with a lot of people watching you and you have to imagine that you are flying through the trees with aliens snapping at your uh, [fanny]. So it’s helpful to have an improvisation background where you’re used to someone saying ‘okay [play like] we’re these people caught in a volcano about to be shot out’. So, you can go there quickly and I found that to be helpful. AGW: Some actors say recording voices for animation is really difficult or the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Cheryl: Well, maybe they didn’t have a fabulous director like we did. It’s strange because you feel like you are going a little bit insane after four hours of listening to your voice over and over. By the end of recording session, you’re tired but you’re not digging ditches! Let’s be honest. Andy: I thought it was pretty easy, honestly. It’s generally what I’m doing at home anyway [uh, talking to himself?]. There just happen to be recorders rolling. I’d walk around the house making chimp noises and screaming ‘look out! It’s headed right for us!’ AGW: Kirk, you have a great cast for the voices in this film. Did you just get lucky? Kirk: The one thing we got very lucky with is we have people that are writers and comedians and directors or people who have done this a million times so they bring so much to it already. They’re basically directing the sessions with us and adding so much to it. We consistently ask for a lot of takes but we never know until we get back to the studio and we put them in front of the animators. Some might sound a lot better than others in the booth but the animators might think they can make more out of one than the other. AGW: There are some jokes that adults will get in this film that your younger audiences won’t. Was it a struggle to get a balance? Kirk: I don’t think it has to do with [a PG rating]. There are some things in here that are more surrealistic and silly that adults might understand or they might be a bit more of a reference to the genre (space or science fiction movies) which, unless you’ve seen a lot of these movies, you wouldn’t get but it wasn’t about how ‘blue’ [or risqué] the comedy was. AGW: I think I read, Cheryl that you said you were ‘monkeylike’ in real life. What did you mean? Cheryl: What did I mean? I guess I’m just a silly monkey [laughter]. Chimps don’t care too much about what other people think of them. We’re very chimp-like. I suppose that’s what I was going after. You just want to have fun! Chimps just want to have fun. Print that! Andy: Yeah. I’m just a little chimp that wants to have fun.
Kirk: Yeah, I think mostly monkeys and bananas. AGW: How long ago did you guys record your voices? Andy: I think we started last February. Kirk: But, it went back and forth as the characters developed and we were building stuff, we’d have to go back and [re-record] because a lot of the stuff happens with action so we’d have to get a certain level of antagonism and comedy and poignance. AGW: Andy you’ve recorded Laser Cats and now Space Chimps. What is your next Sci-Fi animal? Andy: I don’t know but there will be one. I definitely have a Sci Fi [thing] I guess. AGW: Did any of you have an interest in the space program of space travel when you were a kid? Andy: Yeah! I wanted to live in Star Wars world pretty much! Cheryl: I lived right by the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. We’d see the rockets take off. I never wanted to be in one. It looked very dangerous and rightfully so. It is dangerous to be a space chimp or an astronaut. Andy: That’s why you have a light saber! [laughter] Of course, I had one because I belonged to the Star Wars fan club. You get your “Bantha Tracks” magazine and you’re set! Cheryl: I never had a light saber. Andy: I have an extra so I’ll loan it to you. AGW: Did you have any chance to go see real chimps? Andy: No. We did not. For animation, we had a visual reference which we would use but we made this movie in Vancouver, Canada where there’s not a lot of chimps. The nearest chimps in zoos were in Seattle. AGW: So they showed you two what your characters looked like in a drawing or a pre-visualization? Andy: Yeah. I think I saw some stuff. Cheryl: It was fun. You would have a recording session and when I would come back sometimes there would be still shots and sometimes, if we were gone for a while, they would show some of the scenes which was really fun. You could start to imagine the world and understand what you were doing. AGW: Do you think Man should still be exploring Space? Andy: Absolutely. We’ve got to get out there! Who knows what’s coming for us [he’s kidding]. Kirk: Astronauts have all been replaced by these computers and robots and probes that go up. Maybe that’s a better way to venture out but I think, especially for kids looking up with that adventurous, explorer spirit, I think it’s great. Cheryl: Well, it seems like we would have more information about who we are and where we fit into the universe and know more about the planets and what’s really happening out there. It seems like an important part of the big picture. AGW: On another subject, Cheryl, you are now shooting Labor Pains with Lindsey Lohan. Are the paparazzi driving you crazy on set? Cheryl: It is very odd. I find the paparazzi to be very invasive. Andy: They are the worst Nazis. What do they want? Cheryl: It’s just surprising that they don’t know boundaries and they don’t respect filmmaking and there have been times when we’ve had to stop shooting so we could move the paparazzi out of the shot. There should be something you can do about it! There is lots of security around but there have been a couple of fist fights. They are mean to each other. They turn on each other. It’s very exciting to watch!
Pictures courtesy of and copyright 20th Century Fox |
 
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Funny
actor/comic Andy Samberg of TV’s “Saturday Night Live”
and the movie Hot Rod and funny actress Cheryl Hines of TV’s
“Curb Your Enthusiasm” got to voice astronaut chimpanzees
Ham III and Lieutenant Luna in the fun animated adventure Space Chimps.
Along with director Kirk DeMicco, they joined us on the 20th Century Fox
movie lot in L.A. to talk about the film midst a setting of banana trees
and all things Chimp-like. We even got to eat our fill of frozen chocolate
bananas! 
Andy:
Kirk was really cool about trying a lot of stuff for sure. We would always
do what was on script first to make sure we had it so the story tracked
and then he was like ‘all right. Now, do whatever you got’
and we’d goof around and he’d pitch me stuff that I would
try so it was a loose environment. I’d say that stand-up and SNL
and all the stuff I’ve done was helpful. 
AGW:
So, Kirk when you are directing a movie about space monkeys does it just
take over your life and do you dream about them too?