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Chipmunks are running amok in the multiplex. Computer-generated Pip (well, it's a cuter name than Chip) dangles by its little paws in the hit Enchanted. And they're the stars of Alvin and the Chipmunks, which opens on December 14. How much do you know about the four-to-six-inch-long critters?

Photographs by iStockphoto and Dean Conger

Misshapen monsters, vengeful mothers, manly men, and a virtually naked Angelina Jolie: It must be Beowulf, Hollywood-style.
Herewith, a five-point primer that might come in handy at any cocktail party or water cooler where the topic is epic poems and their cinematic spawn. 1.    Plot. The film starts off by following the poem: A denuded monster named Grendel attacks the mead hall of Danish King Hrothgar and slaughters those inside. The Geat (that is, Swedish) champion Beowulf travels across the sea to vanquish the fiend, which he does, memorably and bloodily. But then, plotlines diverge. In the poem, Grendel’s mother kills more mead-hall folks. Beowulf tracks her back to her watery lair and slays her, too. He then returns to Geatland, becomes king, and—50 years later—slays a marauding dragon (though his thane Wiglaf does some of the heavy lifting). Beowulf dies in the process and is honored with a pyre, barrow, etc. In the movie, Beowulf kind of falls for the sultry Jolie, er, Grendel’s mom. And together they have a baby … dragon.
2.    Authorship. No one really knows. Scholars used to think the work was passed down by storytellers, tale singers, and the like—and eventually transcribed, probably by a monk. These days, the conventional wisdom is that a single poet synthesized strains of history, religion, and myth to concoct the tale. As for the movie version? Well, that’s easy: Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.
3.    Language. The poem is somewhat typical of Old English, meaning it’s rife with alliterative verse, caesuras, and kennings. The film is somewhat typical of Hollywood, meaning it serves up an alphabet soup of dialects, speech patterns, and manners of address. The title character growls his lines in a burry brogue; Grendel shrieks and mews in Old English babyspeak; and Grendel’s mother appears to have learned her accent from her adopted children.
4.    Religion. The poem has a split spiritual personality. The people are pagans, and the time is pre-Christian, yet the narrator drops biblical references, and his characters pray to one God. That’s probably because the poem was written in the 8th century, when Christianity was ascendant. The movie interprets that split in a way that doesn’t quite make sense: There are heroes, who are good, and there are Christians, who are sometimes not so good. When Hrothgar’s courtier Unferth wonders whether Christianity might deliver them from Grendel, the king says, “No, we need a hero.” When an older Beowulf is taking stock of his life, he concludes, “The Christ God has killed heroes.”
5.    Footwear. One theory holds that Grendel’s mother—whom scholars have called everything from a magical Valkyrie to a marked woman carrying the curse of Cain—had hand-like feet. But in the movie … holy Steve Madden: Her feet appear to have transformed into stiletto heels! The better to negotiate dank caves, we guess. -Jeremy Berlin
 

Here at Pop Omnivore, we are interested in evolution. Especially the evolution of the music video. Many years ago, long before the invention of MTV, the French invented something called a Scopitone.

A Scopitone is like a juke box that played "music cinema"—color 16mm films projected onto a TV-size screen. A hit in Europe, the Scopitone disappeared shortly after arriving in the United States in 1964.

Fortunately, you do not need to purchase a Scopitone to engage in this primitive video viewing. You can hit eBay and buy titles on DVD. Or simply go to the incredible Scopitone blog  and download them to your iPod.

Here at Pop Omnivore, we have a few favorites:

Ike Cole Salutes His Brother Nat "King" Cole

"Je M'eclate Au Senegal" by the Martin Circus

"Tijuana Taxi" by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass

"St. Louis Blues" by Lou Rawls

French music videos from the '60s on your iPod? Just call it Web 0.2.

-Paul Heltzel

Thank you, 30 Rock.

After last night’s green-themed episode (starring an out-of-control green spokesman named Greenzo), we now have two great lines that will indubitably help save the earth:

1.    For exasperated mothers and wives everywhere: “How dare you open that refrigerator--you're killing penguins!”
2.    The ultimate eco-putdown: "Do you even bother to compost your own feces?"

And yes, Nobel laureate Al Gore made a guest appearance. For those who’ve puzzled over our trivia question about other Nobel figures who’ve dabbled in TV comedy, here’s the answer:

1.    In 1994, when Jimmy Carter was a former president and a mere eight years away from his Nobel Peace Prize, he appeared on the sitcom Home Improvement.

2.    Peace Nobelist Henry Kissinger dropped in on The Colbert Report in 2006.

A tip o’ the green hat to ace researcher Shelley Sperry, who unearthed these two pieces of information that will be a boon to would-be Jeopardy contestants everywhere.

-Marc Silver

Ok, we made fun of The Biggest Loser yesterday for purporting to teach contestants how to exercise without electricity. (The sidewalk ... it's just like a treadmill, except you end up somewhere different than where you started!) But I was pleasantly surprised that the show, in which overweight people compete to lose weight, took on the green theme with gusto.

Last night's challenge was introduced with stacks of empty pizza boxes and other trash to show the losers how much waste they produce over a year of eating. Then the truly impressive part: Two giant trucks dumped out a heap of 148,000 soda cans representing the number of sodas the contestants had consumed in their lifetimes. There was a little lecture about recycling, followed by the challenge. The two-person teams had to race to the pile, pick up as many cans as they could, run up a very steep ramp, and toss the empties into a recycling bin. This looked like it would be pretty exhausting even if you didn't weigh 300 pounds. The pair with the most cans after half an hour won two cars. But not just any cars—they were hybrid SUVs. So, thumbs up to The Biggest Loser for taking the green theme and running with it.

—Helen Fields

NBC is going green all week long! What does this mean? The peacock logo that perches (rather annoyingly) in the corner of the screen during shows is green. Sometimes, a lil’ green feather detaches and sets up a green tip. Did you know you should buy a power strip to plug all your stuff into, and then turn the strip off, because when electric devices are plugged into the wall, they still use up electricity? I’m unplugging my refrigerator right now!

But back to the question at hand: How is NBC turning its prime-time programs green? We watched Chuck and Heroes to find out.

Chuck: Computer nerd turned fledgling spy Chuck goes back to Stanford, which kicked him out for allegedly cheating (he says he was innocent). Guess what, there’s a Green Festival on campus the day of a big football game. There’s a big sign for the Nature Conservancy. Nice brand placement! A student tells Casey the spy to plant a tree. Casey tells the student to take a shower. Casey, Casey, Casey! You should have told him to take a very short shower, since heating water uses up earth’s resources! Also, planting trees is good. Casey is clearly not green.

Since this show is all about subliminal messages, we looked for subliminal green messages. An evil manager at Buy More, Harry Tang, drinks coffee from a mug. Way to go, Harry–no Styrofoam for you.  Maybe you're not so evil after all. A nameless Icelandic spy likes to ding victims with a crossbow. Way to go, Icelandic spy. Crossbows definitely seem more eco-friendly than guns and bullets and bombs and stuff. Best of all: The episode solved a mystery. Howcum Chuck’s roomie falsely accused him of cheating? Because Chuck’s roomie didn’t want the CIA to recruit Chuck, because he has too much heart to be a spy. So instead, the roomie ruined Chuck’s life. Plus, now Chuck is a spy anyway. This revelation means that many curious viewers can unplug their TV sets from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. every Monday, thus saving electricity. Um, unless you are tempted to tune in next week to see if Chuck and Sarah, his CIA handler, engage in a little tree hugging, if you get my drift.

Heroes: The only hints of greenness on Monday's episode were that darn green peacock logo, a green glow around the planet in the intro sequence, and a video during a commercial break in which cast members planted trees in large pots at what appeared to be Rockefeller Center. ("My character wants to destroy the world and I want to save it," one actor says, although I might recommend taking this beyond potted plants.)

This leaves us with the fundamental sustainability questions of Heroes: Do superpowers like regeneration and mind-reading emit carbon dioxide? Can dramatic music be recycled? Do cheerleaders pollute? One of the characters has been in 17th-century Japan since the end of last season, so you can't accuse him of overusing fossil fuels, since he's hanging out with samurai in a pre-industrial society. However, his power is teleportation, which sounds like it would use a lot of energy. Where does he get this energy? Perhaps NBC could explore these questions the next time they have a green week.

Meanwhile, the best green plot line of the week clearly belongs to The Biggest Loser. Here it is: “the contestants learn to exercise without electricity.” We’d like to recycle an excellent joke at this point, from the current issue of Entertainment Weekly: “Wow, neato! Foot-powered bicycles, self-propelled aquatic travel, treadmills called ‘sidewalks’!”

And you know we’ll be watching when Nobel prize guy Al Gore utters these immortal words on Thursday’s  30 Rock: “A whale is in trouble. I have to go!”

Pop Omnivore readers, our trivia question for you: Has a Nobel laureate ever appeared on a sitcom (or comedy program) before? We’ll have the answer on Friday! Hint: It's absolutely, positively not Albert Schweitzer in a Very Special Episode of I Love Lucy.

-Marc Silver and Helen Fields

The 12th season of reality show The Amazing Race premieres Sunday with the show's first-ever visit to Ireland. The teams fly from California to Shannon, Ireland, where it rains a lot and everyone gives bad directions.

The Amazing Race, in the words of one contestant (a lesbian Episcopal priest), is "a love letter to the planet." Teams of two—brother and sister, father and daughter, best friends, and so on—travel the world, competing in challenges and racing to be the first team to finish that leg of the journey. The last team to arrive is usually sent home.

So we asked our resident Ireland expert, magazine researcher David O'Connor, how well the show represented his homeland. "I feel their pain on the directions," he writes. Off the main roads, there aren't very many signs, and roads seem to stop at random.

In the funniest part of this week's show, each team has to load bricks of peat into baskets on a donkey and convince it to walk back to the entrance of the farm. Peat—partly decayed plant matter found in wetlands—was traditionally burned as fuel in Ireland. I don't know if you've heard, but donkeys have a reputation for being stubborn. Some donkeys strolled happily with their loads of peat; others had their own feelings about helping the teams.

Most people have more efficient ways to heat their houses now, and those who do use peat don't necessarily move it around on donkeys. If the show was really going for accuracy, O'Connor says, the teams would have "hit a hurley ball or herded sheep." (The hurley ball or sliotar is the ball used in hurling.) And he points out a cultural mistake: The challenges involve no alcohol.

—Helen Fields

If everything you knew about bees came from Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie, you wouldn’t be too bad off. It isn’t just a crazy (and pretty darn funny) animated ride. It also squeezes in bee facts and makes a strong and generally accurate statement about the honey-makers’ vital role in nature. But the movie did take a few liberties. Here’s what Seinfeld said—and what really happens in bee world.

Bees don’t fly in the rain.
Basically true. Honeybees generally avoid rain. A wet bee is a heavy bee and could easily drown in a small puddle. Although some bees (mason orchard bees, for example) aren’t as put off by water, honeybees tend to head back to the hive in anything more than light drizzle. Score one for Bee Movie.

Each honeybee keeps the same job for life.
Not too far off. A bee may keep the same job a long time (and the queen keeps her gig for life—two or three years in the wild, a year in a commercial bee operation). And there are bees with very specialized jobs, like fanning the queen or carrying off bee corpses from the hive. But it isn’t quite as simple as one bee, one job. Living months if they overwinter or mere weeks if born in the summer, most workers progress through a series of jobs that get more and more sophisticated. They might go from cleaning combs to feeding larvae to nectar and pollen production. During mid-life, some become guard bees, protecting the hive from robber bees and parasites. Meanwhile, the movie hints that a career may be passed down from father to offspring—a genetic phenomenon that’s actually been documented. Bet the filmmakers had no idea!

Big manly “pollen jocks” do all the pollen gathering.
Ok, try pollen jockettes. While drones that mate with the queen are, obviously, male, all worker honeybees are female. The movie doesn’t even try to get that right. Substitute Janeane Garofalo for Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps, and you’d have something.

Honeybees will fly six miles to a food source.
Not typically. There are reports of seven-mile flights, but most honeybees stay within about a two-mile radius of the hive. So … not incorrect, but perhaps a little misleading.

Bees have been around 27 million years.
Try again. The oldest known bee was discovered last year in Burma, embedded in amber: It’s a whopping 100 million years old. Bee fossils have been dated to 65 million years back. Perhaps the film was referring specifically to the honeybee genus Apis, which is indeed thought to be around 25 million years old.

Beekeepers are villains who steal honey from slave bees.
Ok, let the filmmakers have their fun. But I must say the beekeepers I’ve met have great respect for their charges and treat them quite well (although trucking bees from place to place to pollinate crops is no doubt a stressful ride).

If honeybees stop working, all the flowers and trees go kaput.
Honeybees are major pollinators but others pitch in: different types of bees, birds, butterflies. Still, honeybees have an unmatched role in crop pollination—a point made headlines in the last two years with their massive die-offs due to an ailment called “Colony Collapse Disorder,” caused at least in part by a new virus. So the movie’s message, which you absolutely can’t miss (it is written for kids, after all), is especially relevant: We need these little guys. Badly. Quit swatting (it only makes them mad) and spraying and start appreciating all that bees do for us.

I’d give the movie an A for entertainment, and—what else—a B for education.

-Jennifer S. Holland

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