Interview: Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber on morality and film

LifeSiteNews.com interviews veggie tales creators as new movie opens Jan 11

By John-Henry Westen,

LifeSiteNews.com

The latest Veggie Tale movie is coming to the big screen Jan 11. Hence, LifeSiteNews.com interviewed Veggie Tales creators Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki yesterday on why they do what they do.

Veggietales' half-hour shorts, filled with Biblical morality, have become ever more popular since their launch in 1993, and have been a mainstay for Christian parents in North America.

Asked what inspired the morally-themed, Biblically based productions, Vischer explained that he "grew up in Church" with his grandfather, a preacher in Omaha Nebraska. He described himself as "a really shy kid who liked to tell stories," who started making films at age 9. However the ultimate push to make moral films came from and unlikely source - MTV.

Vischer explains: "In high school I was watching MTV. I remember thinking this is really cool, the kind of stories they're telling and the technology they're using, and these little mini movies that they make. But my second thought was 'this is trouble.' Because the values that I had learned growing up in Sunday school were not the values that were coming across in music videos, and in many cases were the exact opposite.

"So I remember being really convicted, 'I think this is what I'm supposed to do in my life. I'm supposed to use the same creativity, the same technology, the same kind of story telling but kind of flip the polarity on the values and fill my stories with what I learned in Sunday school, Biblical values rather than the world's values.' For me that was really the inspiration."

Mike Nawrocki recalls the he and Phil met in Bible College. There they became friends, enjoying working doing puppets together, putting on performances which led to the now famous characters Bob the Tomato (voiced by Phil) and Larry the Cucumber (voiced by Mike).

Vischer has three children and Nawrocki two. They explain that their children have assisted in productions. Nawrocki told LifeSiteNews.com that the children have also been an inspiration. "The inspiration of having children who are going through issues," he said. "As a parent it'd be great to tell a story to help them go through this issue."

The dynamic pair play off one another so well in the three-way phone interview that the seamless changes between speakers makes it sometimes difficult to discern who's speaking. They warn that the huge business of children's television is something to be countered as it is geared to "get commercial messages into kids brains at a very young age - trying to turn them as early as possible into rabid consumers of pop culture."

Vischer says, "There's really good stuff for kids when they're very very young because the TV programmers know that's when Mom controls the remote control . . . But when they're ten and eleven they're trying to transition them into MTV."

So, says Vischer, "We're really trying to create alternatives for parents who are concerned about having more control in the messages their kids are consuming from media." He added: "Trying to replace consumerist messages and more worldly messages that define success in terms of beauty and money and replace those with those that define success, like we do in our movie, with the ability to help others. Let's completely change the morality of this and see if we can offset some of the influence the media is having on our kids."

The pair are not shy about being politically incorrect with quoting of Bible verses and instilling Biblical morality into the hearts of children. "It's all a matter of world-view," says Nawrocki, "and recognizing there are competing world-views that we're up against in our culture."

"Just drawing that line in the sand and saying we're going to tell stories from a Biblical world-view, from a Biblical perspective, that looks at life with the assumption that there is a God who made us and who loves us, that wants a relationship with us. That is opposed to a post-modernist world-view where a lot of media comes out of. I think the grounding in that Judeo-Christian world-view defines the stories that we tell and gives authority to the messages of those stories. Obviously we really believe that those messages are true and a great many people in this country do as well, so we want to hold firm to that and say this is the place that we're telling stories out of.

Adds Vischer: "And at the end of the day, if a family doesn't want their kids growing up with Biblical values, there are plenty of shows that will help them do that."

Asked if increasing popularity has made it more difficult to remain true to Christian primciples, Vischer replied, "For the most part it makes it easier. When we were unknown and starving and having a hard time making payroll and a distributor would come in and say 'Hey we think we can get you a great deal on your videos and bring in a lot of money if you'll take all the Bible verses off and edit out every reference to God.' Then it was hard. I really had to say 'okay God you really want me to toe this line, to keep this standard, right?' Because its going to cost something."

"When you've become a big success, Hollywood then starts to say whatever you're doing keep doing it, because it's working. So it actually becomes easier."

Nawrocki added that challenges and struggles have helped to keep them humble. "For me personally, just realizing it's not us, not with our own power that we're doing this with, God is in control of the situation regardless of the success or failure of any given project," he said. "God is ultimately in control of it."

The movie Veggie Tales: The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything opens in theatres across the United States and Canada on January 11, 2008.

New iPad POLL! VOTE NOW! Will you buy new iPad?

[01/12/2008]

Print Version