By 1991, when computer animation was coming into its own, Chicagoan Phil Vischer could do it all.
He could make a Pop Tart box flex and stretch and fly out of the video frame. He could make sparkling chrome letters spiral around a beer bottle. He even designed a logo making Jerry Springer’s show look appealing.
He just couldn’t convince himself that any of this was serving God — or, for that matter, humankind.
So one day he sat down at the computer in his bedroom and sketched out two big, lopsided eyes with lids at half mast. Around them he painstakingly built a cartoony, three-dimensional-looking cucumber, which he named Larry. As the weeks went on, he added a sidekick, Bob the Tomato, and decided the virtual vegetables were his future.
In 1998, energetic boxes and orbiting text on television are no longer any big deal. Jerry Springer has lost his novelty too.
But Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato, narrators of a series of children’s home videos called VeggieTales, have exploded into the entertainment world in perhaps the most naive and heartwarming story ever to terrify the Hollywood establishment.
The Bible-based VeggieTales, created and produced in a renovated warehouse just west of Chicago’s Loop, debuted in 1993 as a Christian bookstore curiosity, building an audience by word of mouth. This summer, however, they crossed over to the mass market, where they have become an instant sensation.
Some analysts credit VeggieTales’ surprise success to their creative quality. Others say it is a case of serendipity — the appearance of palatable, morally uplifting children’s entertainment just as the nation’s “culture wars” reached a fever pitch.
Certainly as parents fret publicly about violence, sex and sheer mindlessness on television, the VeggieTales story is proof that a few million are willing to put their money where their mouths are.
So far the 10 half-hour VeggieTales home videos have sold a total of more than 4 million copies. They are expected to double that in the next year.
“Most of the successful children’s properties are things that come from TV,” said Cindy Spielvogel, managing editor of Video Week in New York. “It’s really hard to be a company that comes up with a Barney out of nowhere — but it looks like that is what they have done.”
Since VeggieTales were released in general market outlets such as WalMart and Musicland this summer, one or more episodes have been on VideoScan’s list of top 10 children’s videos for 21 consecutive weeks, often ahead of kids’ television staples such as “Doug,” “Arthur” and “The Magic School Bus.”
“My question is, how come it took so long?” said George Rosenbaum, CEO of the Chicago market research firm Leo J. Shapiro and Associates. From congressional debates on television violence to the conservative Christian campaign against sex in the media, he explained, the mass market was primed for an overtly moral product for children.
When Vischer set out to create VeggieTales, he was thinking mostly of giving his own children something to watch. Now the 32-year-old Bible-college dropout presides over Big Idea Productions, with 60 employees and what he describes as the biggest animation studio in the Midwest.
Some of the VeggieTales videos are Bible stories, such as a David-and-Goliath remake in which Junior Asparagus slays the Big Pickle. Some are original stories. All have clear moral themes and feature a Bible verse at the end.
They also feature smart writing, catchy tunes, characters with a Monty Python sensibility and a self-referential sense of humor — right down to the double-takes that raise Larry’s droopy eyelids — that have won over as many adults as children.
On college campuses, students hold VeggieTales parties. Pastors wear VeggieTales neckties in the pulpit. When “Madame Blueberry,” a VeggieTale about the dangers of greediness, was shipped out this summer, 200 Christian bookstores all over the nation organized their own opening-night screenings that attracted thousands of ticket-buying fans.
At a wide spectrum of churches, VeggieTales are used as teaching tools. The Libertyville United Methodist Church, for instance, organized its entire summer Sunday School program around VeggieTales this year.
“After the first week the kids were so taken with the videos and the music, we knew we had really hit on something,” said Peggy Berryman, a parent and curriculum coordinator for the Sunday school. “The only problem was, the tapes kept disappearing from the office. People kept taking them home to watch them.”
“It’s pretty basic stuff — love your neighbor, stand up for the Lord,” she explained. “I’m glad to see that someone is out there singing it out loud and proud.”
Like his great-grandfather, the radio preacher Rev. R.R. Brown, whose Omaha-based “Radio Chapel Service” reached more than half a million listeners during its heyday in the 1930s, Vischer is looking to keep the message ecumenical.
“There’s no board of theologians telling us what’s appropriate,” he said. “We’re just kind of depending on our gut.”
The Bible stories are a good illustration.
“The basic plot points — we can’t mess with those. The basic message — you can’t get rid of that. We clearly mark out what is the heart of the story, and we take that very seriously,” he explained. “But once we’ve figured out what’s sacred, nothing else is.”
Even in 1991, when VeggieTales was nothing more than a 12-second demonstration clip of Larry the Cucumber bouncing around a kitchen counter and mugging for the camera, family and friends believed he was onto something.
“It was like getting a peek inside his brain,” said Lisa Vischer, his wife, who was at home in Chicago with the first of their three children.
No distributor would finance the venture based on the strength of Larry’s 12-second debut, however, and Phil Vischer had neither the time nor the sophisticated equipment to produce a full video.
But with Larry threatening to die on the vine, Vischer’s parents took out a second mortgage on their home and gave their son the money to buy a new computer. Vischer’s sister loaned him her son’s college fund. A couple from his church, Park Community Church on Chicago’s Near North Side, invested their retirement savings in the project.
By July 1993, Vischer had $250,000, enough to persuade him to quit his job and buy advertising in Christian magazines promising the delivery of the first VeggieTales video by Christmas.
Vischer set himself up in a storefront on Foster Avenue, between a comic book store and a Spanish grocery. He hired two young art school graduates to help him. Because of a rental disagreement, they had no heat, so they huddled in parkas, next to a space heater, breaking from the animation only to answer the toll-free line Vischer had installed to take orders.
Three days before Christmas, nearly 500 copies of “Where’s God When I’m S-scared?” were mailed out. Enough arrived in time, Vischer figures, to exonerate him of mail fraud.
One of the first orders landed at Word Music, an arm of the Christian giant Word Publishing. After five more months of deep debt and shaky payrolls for Vischer, Word Music agreed to distribute VeggieTales to Christian bookstores.
General distributors took note too. Late in 1994, one offered to put VeggieTales in every WalMart in the nation, if Vischer would agree to take God and the Bible out.
“We were still starving then, so that was very tempting,” he said. “But how can we teach God’s truth and edit out God?”
Vischer turned that offer down, but this summer the VeggieTales videos, God and all, were released in WalMart, Kmart and other retail behemoths around the nation, instantly multiplying sales.
Now, Big Idea is attracting talent from the general market as well, including animators from Disney, the marketing executive who helped launch Cabbage Patch dolls into the retail stratosphere, and 55-year-old Bob Patin, the former chief executive officer of a major commercial insurance company, who gave up risk management to help Big Idea make the transition from personal project to major organization.
“The best of businesses, the very best, are profoundly spiritual in their behavior,” Patin said. “They have this remarkable sense of community of spirit. People spend their lives trying to become part of something they think is important.”
Vischer is serious about his mission, which he says is to create a moral alternative to the four or five major media corporations that dominate Hollywood and television.
But he’s never serious for too long: “I want to be half Walt Disney, half Billy Graham, if that can happen without creating toxic fumes.”
