Dreamworks Picture's Madagascar is now open and is getting some great reviews. Here's the official site for MADAGASCAR - The Movie, starring the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith and David Schwimmer (Friends).
The video game based on the movie is also released today (May 24th) and versions are available on PC CD-Rom, Microsoft's XBox, Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo GameCube.
The game features three mini-game bonus chapters, including a "Lemur Rave" where you can test out your rhythm skills to cool jungle beats, and Melmen's helicopter neck-fling ammo includes coconuts and lemurs!
Here's Activision's Madagascar game homepage.
Environmentalists hope that the release of this movie will help in their protection of the endangered animals of Madagascar, including the Aye-Aye Lemur as visited by Douglas Adams in Last Chance To See. Most of the animals that live there can be found nowhere else on the planet.
Executives at Conservation International, are pulling strings as fast as they can in California and Madagascar, an island a little larger than California, to make sure the movie generates the sort of tourism that helps save the country's spectacular, and increasingly endangered, forests and animals. Within a few months, they think, thousands of moviegoers will decide they'd like to see the real Madagascar, and the country had better get ready.Full story at Post Gazette.com.
Scientists at Duke University also see this potential.
- Conservation scientist Luke Dollar, who studies the island's top predator, called the fossa, sees the movie as drawing much-needed attention to the plight of Madagascar's endangered species.
- Cognitive neuroscientist Elizabeth Brannon sees the movie as highlighting the island's extraordinary lemurs, whose intelligence she is learning is far greater than previously believed.
- The primatologists at the Duke Primate Center hope the movie will attract interest to the fascinating array of lemur species that populate the island.
