Foreword (What Was VeggieTales?)
On March 30, 2022, Jeremy Boreing, the co-CEO of conservative media conglomerate The Daily Wire, held a town hall. Disturbed by Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” he announced that The Daily Wire would be investing $100 million into DW Kids, a new venture to create safe, “anti-woke” shows and movies for kids. “You can’t save America if you don’t live like an American,” Boreing explained before reminding his audience that living “like an American” first meant “honoring our historic Christian values.”
All DW Kids projects are in early development, but he excitedly announced that they have hired two writers for their first series who were “writers on VeggieTales, the animated series.” While this is only marginally true of these two writers, Boreing knew what being able to namedrop “VeggieTales” would indicate to his audience. DW Kids shows will not just be free of content that conservative parents might find objectionable, but it will promote ideas these parents wanted to see present.
The world of children’s media is still a lucrative battleground in larger, ongoing culture wars. Even 20 years after the height of its popularity, the VeggieTales series is still the best conservatives have ever had. It is still the moral benchmark for children’s media in the eyes of parents who — by both instinct and influence — have come to fear the industry that produces it.
I was born in 2000 which was a big year for Big Idea Productions, the company that produced — and at the time, only produced — VeggieTales videos. By the year 2000, one of every three American families with young children owned at least one VeggieTales video. That’s not just every Presbyterian family, Catholic family, or even every broadly-defined “Christian” family. For America, it was one in every three homes.
Big Idea was a company in its cultural and financial prime. The previous three years saw their revenue explode 3,300% from $1.3 million in 1996 to $44 million in 1999. Veggie videos and merchandise were more widely available than they had ever been, and I was surrounded by them by my parents, Sunday school volunteers, and pre-school teachers as I came into cultural, social, and religious consciousness. These videos were designed to illustrate the moral lessons that I was learning in church and from my parents while supplementing the lessons I’d learned about God. For churched and unchurched kids alike, the lofty promise of VeggieTales was that learning about and learning to love the Bible and its God could be as engaging and as fun as any other cartoon on the market.
This level of success didn’t last — Big Idea Productions declared bankruptcy only 4 years later which began the cultural descent of the series as a whole. Still, the impact of the series was made, and it was wide. A generation of children inside — but not limited to — Christian subcultures grew up listening as closely to what talking vegetables had to say about God as they were to anyone else if not more.
Relative to the history of American evangelicalism, the phenomenon of VeggieTales was a flash in the pan, and it may seem frivolous to waste time and energy on a long-form analysis of a video series that’s so far past its prime. However, it was a product of forces and influences that have been shaping the cultural engagement of evangelicals for decades. To become more aware of the ideological water in which evangelicals were and are swimming, we would do well to take seriously one of that culture’s most preeminent and widely-accepted artifacts.
This series will rely heavily on There’s Never Been a Show Like Veggie Tales: Sacred Messages in a Secular Market by Dr. Hillary Warren and Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables by Phil Vischer for information about Big Idea and VeggieTales creators. Unless indicated otherwise, these two books are the sources of information on these topics.
In the first of three pieces, “The Gospel According to Phil Vischer,” I will explore the history of American evangelism through popular media and the cultural forces animating VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer, Big Idea’s primary evangelist. In the second, “Veggies for Sale,” I will explore how VeggieTales found its audience both inside and outside of Christian circles. In the third and final piece, “What We’ve Learned Today,” I will engage the values and limitations of VeggieTales as ethical and theological education within the context of American evangelicalism.
With all this in mind, it’s time for VeggieTales.
