VeggieTales: How it all began
Phil Vischer has written a book about the history of VeggieTales called Me, Myself, and Bob, available through amazon.com and many other book retailers. |
CD: What role would you say that humor plays in our faith as Christians?VISCHER: I don’t even think it’s so much as Christians but as humans. I think humor was God’s gift, besides faith, for coping with the human condition. [I have] the picture in my head of the chuckling monk. How else did he get through a day of feeding the poor? Life is so bittersweet, so melancholy.
I just read Steve Martin’s autobiography and it made me sad. These really funny guys [are sometimes] lacking in faith. They’re using humor to try to win love. I think there’s a great value in kind of redeeming humor, combining it with faith. Although many of the faithful aren’t particularly funny. (laughter) I’m not sure why that is. It’s kind of sad. They give an award in the Christian bookstores market for the funniest Christian of the year. Mike and I won it like three years running until it was almost embarrassing.
CD: What is your goal for VeggieTales?NAWROCKI: With the movie, it’s to try to start a conversation about why we’re here. Even among Christians, so many of us have just really fallen into consumerism: “I was put here to consume, and the world is my shopping mall.” God calls us to be producers, not consumers. We’re put here to do good works, which He’s prepared for us from the beginning. So I’m just trying to start the conversation of linking that together with that innate desire to be heroes. When we’re little kids, we pick up swords, and we want to fight dragons, and we want to save people from things. Well, there’s a connection there. God gave us that desire from childhood and he’s prepared adventures for us, which may be huge, may be tiny — that’s irrelevant. But we’ve got these adventures that He’s calling us into, but we’ve got to get off the couch.
For me [it’s giving] parents a resource to pass on biblical values to their kids. To take a story which has such a powerful impact on kids and use that to reflect a biblical worldview that can help kids learn about the Bible, learn about the values in the Bible, and learn what it means that God made them special and He loves them very much.
VISCHER: I would say that is my personal mission. To help raise the next generation of Christians. To look at kids who are getting 20 minutes a week from a church and then 21 hours a week from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel and say, “OK, whose values are they really growing up with here?” And to just look for ways to help. Hopefully VeggieTales will continue to be one of those ways.
CD
Julie Rattey is managing editor of Catholic Digest.
