 | | | The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything (Credit: Big Idea)
| |
Find talking vegetables online
For more information about VeggieTales and the movie, visit bigidea.com and veggiepirates.com.
Why vegetables?
In 1989, in a spare bedroom in Chicago, animator Phil Vischer was trying to figure out exactly which robotic CGI (computer-generated imagery) characters with no arms, legs, hair, or clothes could carry a story in a half-hour video. Then it came to him: candy bars — tall, slender … perfect.
Shortly thereafter, his wife, Lisa, glanced in from the spare bedroom door and said, “You know, moms are going to be mad if you make their kids fall in love with candy bars.” A while later, Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber bounced across a tiled kitchen counter and on their way into animation and children’s entertainment history.
— Big Idea |
The talking vegetables from VeggieTales, the popular Christian series for children, will hit the big screen on January 11 in
The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.
Catholic Digest recently spoke with Veggie Tales creators Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki about faith, family, vegetables, and pirates.
CD: Both of you are parents. How did that impact the development of VeggieTales?NAWROCKI: Growing up in the church I was involved in doing puppetry and Sunday school and stuff like that for kids. So for me it was part of what I had always done.
VISCHER: I saw that there was kind of gap between the shows that were good for kids and the shows that kids liked. They needed the apple, but they wanted the Twinkie. Was there a way to make an apple taste more like a Twinkie? (That) was really what I was trying to do.
CD: Phil, in a speech given at Yale in 2005 about the VeggieTales phenomenon, you talked about how the series used a particular style of humor and teaching that met an untapped need “for a generation whose own attitudes and worldview were in radical upheaval…. It was exactly what people didn’t know they were looking for.” Can you talk a little more about that?VISCHER: I think VeggieTales was shaped a lot by my generation’s experience being parented and how we were the children of the sexual revolution. We were kind of the fallout, the ones who got the short end of the stick. It made [for] a pretty cynical bunch of young adults who were now writing all the TV shows and comic books and movies. I think I said in the speech that our patron saint was David Letterman and (we were) the generation who made light of everything. [There was] an inherent mistrust of sincerity. But at the same time [we wanted sincerity].
Something has to mean something. It’s that tension that drives a lot of what I was trying to do with VeggieTales. Particularly (with) Bob the Tomato, who kind of represented the frustrated Mr. Rogers in a world gone cynical.
CD: How has working on VeggieTales impacted your faith life?NAWROCKI: Well, it does give you a good motivation to get in the Bible. (laughter) Obviously when you’re retelling a Bible story and [trying to] to boil down the lesson for a 4-year old, you really have to dig in and research and get to know it. That’s been very cool.
VISCHER: I have discovered that the stories that I write that seem to touch people the most aren’t the ones where [I say], “Oh, it’s time to write a story, [let’s] crack open the Bible and look for something.” [It’s] the ones that actually come out of my own devotional time, when I’m not looking for a story and God just kind of lights something up on the page.
A Snoodle’s Tale would be one that I’d point out. It came out right after the bankruptcy of my original company (Big Idea); it got no marketing budget whatsoever, so it was just kind of doomed. But more people buy it every year because they find the story so meaningful. I get more emails about that show than I think any other in the last seven or eight years. I realize that my best work doesn’t come when I’m using the Bible as fodder for my work, [but] when I’m using it the way it was intended for my life, and then it informs my work.
