Just as the 2023 Christmas season rolled around, another birthday of sorts was marked. It's been 30 years since the first VeggieTales video was released.
An entire generation grew up watching VeggieTales, which launched on VHS tapes, later as DVDs. Co-creator, Phil Vischer, says videos, featuring Bob the Tomato & Larry the Cucumber sharing Bible stories, eventually found their way into 65-million homes and churches!
You might be interested in knowing how the concept of vegetables talking about God came to be.
Phil shares, “It came out of technological pragmatism, which is probably not where you expect. Some people have accused us of trying to get kids to eat more vegetables, and others have accused us of trying to get them to eat less vegetables, and it was really neither. I was a computer animator in Chicago back around 1990, way, way, like 150 years ago in the early days of computer animation, and I was trying to figure out how to make characters and tell my own stories.”
Phil explains the birth of the VeggieTales characters happened in an unusual way. “But the technology of the day could only handle simple shapes. So, you couldn’t do people. You couldn’t do puppies. You could only do like the Scrubbing Bubbles commercials, which were little balls that race around a bathroom, making it clean.
"‘Okay, I need really simple shapes to tell Bible stories, what should I use?’ And I thought, ‘Well how about a candy bar?’ And so, I made a little candy bar on the computer and I gave him eyes and a nose and a mouth and I thought, ‘Okay, this could work. Kids like candy bars.’ And then my wife walks by and said, ‘You know moms are going to be mad if you make their kids fall in love with candy bars.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, she’s right!’”
Accepting his wife’s wisdom, Phil sidelined the candy bar characters. And the next character idea that popped into Phil’s head was a cucumber, to eventually be named Larry, and also a tomato to be known as Bob.
(Slight spoiler here: technically speaking, cucumbers and tomatoes are fruits, but a lot of people more or less regard them as vegetables, so who cares? Some later characters were obvious fruits, including Pa Grape and Madame Blueberry. But a cartoon called ‘ProduceTales’ doesn’t seem to have the right ring.)