Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "VeggieTales"

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

Hey, everybody, guess what? This is my two hundredth post on this blog! That's exciting, right? Answer: it is, so it should be a really amazing post about something everybody loves, shouldn't it? Answer: it should. And who doesn't love VeggieTales?

You'd think a show about talking produce re-enacting stories from the bible would be really, really lame. Big Idea Productions, however, managed to pull it off quite well. VeggieTales is one of the most beloved children's franchises in the world, with fifty direct-to-video episodes, two theatrical movies (I'm pretty sure I saw Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie in theaters, did YOU?), a couple of TV shows, and tons of merchandise to its name. It's hit some bumps in the road along the way - most recently, creators Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki were kicked out of the franchise by DreamWorks because they wanted to be more involved than just doing the characters' voices again, how messed up is THAT? - but somehow, Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber have prevailed for four decades, and the fanbase is still going strong.

So, here are some things you might not have known about VeggieTales. And on the off-chance you DID know any of these things... sorry, no refunds.

The original sketch for that iconic decorative gourd character, Mr. Lunt.

1) So, why DOES the show star fruits and vegetables? Well, the first VeggieTales video came out in 1993. In the early 1990s, CGI animation was still, more or less, in its infancy, and Phil Vischer wanted to avoid the complexities of animating characters with limbs, hair, and clothes. Before deciding on veggies, he considered having the show star an anthropomorphic candy bar, but his wife Lisa pointed out that the parents of those watching the videos would likely prefer a healthier food as the protagonist. So he thought "What's shaped like a candy bar, but good for kids?" and the next thing that popped into his head was a cucumber... even though cucumbers aren't shaped like candy bars.

2) Larry was the first character to have a model made. Back then, he was called "Mr. Cuke". Phil Vischer did a little animation test of him. Here is that animation test:

3) After that first animation test done with Larry - uh, I mean, Mr. Cuke, Phil Vischer went over to Mike Nawrocki's apartment to brainstorm some ideas for the stories that the show's characters would tell. Phil had already thought of The Grapes of Wrath (which was the first segment in the second VeggieTales video, God Wants Me To Forgive Them?!). Mike came up with "Bridge Over Pumpkin Pie", "Lime and Punishment", and "War and Peaches" (none of which ever actually got made).

4) Mike Nawrocki was also the one who suggested naming the show "VeggieTales".

5) VeggieTales could've been a Nicktoon! No, really. When Phil heard that Nickelodeon was looking for ideas for their first three original animated shows, he submitted his "Mr. Cuke" test footage to them. They rejected it, telling Phil that "Nickelodeon does not produce computer-animated shows".

Concept art for the twenty-second episode, Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen.

6) After failing to get Christian publishers interested in VeggieTales, Phil decided that maybe he needed to show them more than just ten seconds of a goofy cucumber. First, he decided to give Mr. Cuke a buddy. And since Mr. Cuke was tall and thin, he decided that the vegetable should be short and round (a la Laurel and Hardy and/or Abbott and Costello). Thus was created Bob the tomato.

Pictured: a Bob that I would much rather have running the Disney corporation than
Bob Iger.

To build a model of Bob, Phil made copies of Mr. Cuke's facial features and put them on a tomato. The only significant difference between the two characters' faces was the teeth - Phil didn't want to give the tomato a single tooth like he'd given Mr. Cuke. Amusingly, he felt that if "Mr. Tomato" had a single tooth, the result would be "Hee Haw in a vegetable patch".

7) Now, obviously the characters were deserving of more creative names than "Mr. Cuke" and "Mr. Tomato". Phil figured that in "a typical Christian show", they'd be named Tommy Tomato and Kooky Cucumber. But he didn't want to make "a typical Christian show". He wanted to give them "plain names" that didn't rhyme or alliterate. As he put it, "They were regular Joe vegetables, and they needed regular Joe names."

He immediately thought of his stepdad, whose name was Bob. That's how he came up with the idea of naming the tomato Bob. Then he wrote down a list of equally plain names for the cucumber. The name he decided on was Larry.

8) Phil Vischer's mother, who has a doctorate in Christian education, helped him figure out the guidelines for the show. She gave him three pieces of advice. Number one - do not portray Jesus as a vegetable. Number two - try not to imply that vegetables can have redemptive relationships with God (which meant not showing the produce praying unless they were playing the role of a historical or biblical figure). Number three - try to communicate to kids how God made each and every one of them unique and how much he loves them.

9) Take a look at this early magazine ad for the series. See anything weird?

Credit goes to NebbaMasterpiece9000 on DeviantArt for uploading this
to the internet.

Yes, there's a sentient toaster behind the veggies. The toaster character was actually going to appear in the show, but was cut because he was too hard to animate.

According to Phil, the toaster's name was "Coucho". It was his sister-in-law's idea (she was sitting on a couch at the time, and "she's very literal").

10) Some influences on VeggieTales' style of humor were Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and the Coen Brothers. Archibald Asparagus was inspired by John Cleese. Mr. Nezzer's voice was inspired by Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Mr. Lunt's was inspired by the Weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I'm not sure if Bob is based on anyone in particular, but Phil Vischer described him as his "inner Mr. Rogers" - though he also said that Archibald is the most like him personality-wise of the characters that he voices.

11) "The Water Buffalo Song" came about one day when Phil found himself crossing the plaza of the Dirksen Federal Building singing a weird little song about everyone having a water buffalo. He got the idea to have Larry come out in the middle of the video and start singing that very song.

Concept art for "Larry's Lagoon", a segment in God Wants Me To Forgive Them?!.

12) Actually, "Silly Songs With Larry" was originally supposed to be a one-off segment. The plan was to have a different sketch in-between the stories, which is why God Wants Me To Forgive Them?! doesn't have a "Silly Songs With Larry" segment - instead, it has an ad for a gizmo called the "Forgive-o-Matic". Then that second video came out, and Big Idea got letters from angry fans demanding NOT why THEY didn't have a water buffalo like Larry claimed but rather where the heck the Silly Song was. And that's how "Silly Songs With Larry" became a thing in each VeggieTales video since.

Incidentally, the "Forgive-o-Matic" segment was based on a puppet show Phil and Mike performed in college.

13) Production on the first video, Where's God When I'm S-S-Scared?!, was a migraine. At first Phil Vischer was the only animator, but then he realized he couldn't do it alone and hired two more animators on the fly. The three animators moved into a rented storefront for extra space, which stretched the budget. And on top of that the project was funded by a Christian mail-order service, and customers started ordering the video WHILE IT WAS STILL IN PRODUCTION. This meant that the filmmakers had to finish the project by a certain date or else they'd be charged with mail fraud.

14) Rack, Shack, and Benny was also a miserable experience to work on. Everyone was exhausted by the end of it due to the ambitious nature of the episode, combined with the fact that there were only ten employees and four computers.

15) How did Phil Vischer decide to have the first video focus on fear? In a 2011 interview, he explained, "I was kind of looking for, you know, the very first basic questions that you could answer for a kid... and thinking about 'Okay, you're scared, at night, in your bed.'" His daughter, Shelby, was going through something like that at the time. "And, so, just looking at some of the other kids' videos out and how you could answer basic questions for kids in a fun but musical way," he continued, "Uh, that seemed like a good place to start."

Found this on Google Image Search.

16) While the animators were working on the second segment of Where's God When I'm S-S-Scared?, they wound up with an unfixable rendering glitch that made the sky flash. What to do? Answer: add in a thunder sound effect and make the flash lightning to go along with it.

17) QWERTY the computer, who always gives us the Bible verses at the conclusion of each episode, got his name from the first six letters on a standard computer keyboard. If you are reading this post on your computer, take a glance at the keyboard - what are the first six letters under the number keys and next to the "TAB" key? Q, W, E, R, T, and Y. I always assumed it was just a goofy made-up scientific-sounding word...

18) Larry was a write-in candidate during the 2016 presidential election (because even a fictional cucumber would be a better president than Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump, amirite?).

Okay, I made that up. Here's something I did NOT make up: Larry's superhero alter ego, Larry-Boy, came to be when Phil Vischer wanted to have Bob be a parody of Batman called "Bat-Bob" with Larry as his sidekick, Larry-Boy. Everyone thought that Larry-Boy was much funnier than Bat-Bob, so Bat-Bob was scrapped.

19) Bob's favorite food is pasta with white sauce. Archibald's favorite foods are roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and oatmeal raisin without the raisins (it'd probably be awkward to eat raisins around Pa Grape).

You'd understand this if you've watched Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed.
If not, please watch this video.

20) Apparently, The Little Mermaid inspired Mr. Lunt to become a filmmaker, whereas The Black Cauldron inspired him to attend the Culinary Academy of Louisiana.

21) It took until 2015 for the series to adapt Noah's Ark (which, depressingly, was the final VeggieTales episode to be released that wasn't an episode of either Netflix series or The VeggieTales Show), but the idea was originally pitched back in 1998. In fact, it was originally going to be the very first VeggieTales movie. They decided against it because, again, small budget for CGI, and the idea of animating so many animals with fur scared them. This is also why, in the "Daniel and the Lion's Den" segment of Where's God When I'm S-S-Scared?, we never actually see the lions - we just see their eyeballs peeking out of the darkness.

22) Speaking of the first VeggieTales movie, Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie wasn't initially planned to be a movie. It was just going to be a 44-minute episode. As Phil Vischer and Mike Narwoski were working on the script, Mike came up with lots and lots of material for the film's "framing device" (the stuff with Bob, Mr. Asparagus and the kids trying to get to a concert). He wrote so much material for it, and it was all so good that Phil couldn't bring himself to cut any of it. And this was not long after a Christian film called The Omega Code was released in theaters, and it made $13 million at the box office with just a $2 million marketing budget. Phil estimated that a VeggieTales film with a $7 million production budget and a $7 million marketing budget needed to make just $18.5 million at the box office and sell three million videos and DVDs.

Production for the film was for all intents and purposes a mess, with stuff like too many new hires and constant budget overruns. The end result was a gigantic number of layoffs. Phil Vischer has talked about it on his blog.

23) When VeggieTales took off in the Christian market, GoodTimes Home Video - y'know, the guys best known for distributing mockbusters of Disney's animated films - offered to release the videos in the mass market. The catch? They wanted all of the religious references to be removed. Phil turned them down.

24) And speaking of wanting to remove all the religious references, that's a wonderful segue to what happened to VeggieTales when it actually aired on TV. Yes, for a few years in the 2000s, NBC actually aired episodes of VeggieTales as part of their children's programming block, Qubo. Much like GoodTimes, they wanted to remove all religious elements - and by "they", I mean the network's standards and practice department. Many, many people were unhappy with this, including Phil, who said that he would've refused to sign the contract with NBC if he'd known about it beforehand.

Is it just me, or does Larry look really good in that suit?

Every episode of the TV version of VeggieTales went like this - Bob and Larry greet the viewers from Bob's house. They get a letter from a kid who has some sort of problem. Another character - either Pa Grape, Mr. Lunt, or Archibald Asparagus - try to solve the problem with a film or story that makes no sense. Bob and Larry then introduce a story from the videos. After the story, they reiterate the moral and Bob thanks the viewers for coming to his house.

The TV version also had a different theme song, complete with a Couch Gag involving Pa Grape making a comment about Archibald's sweater. Here it is:

25) There are references to VeggieTales in Big Idea's OTHER show, 3-2-1 Penguins! (note to self: review 3-2-1 Penguins! at some point). For example, Larry-Boy appears on a mug in the episode "Lazy Daze". And in the episode "Trouble on Planet Wait-Your-Turn", one of the characters mentions Burger Bell, the eatery that Jerry desperately wants to get a cheeseburger from in the iconic song "His Cheeseburger".

26) At one point, after Jonah was released, there were plans for a theatrical VeggieTales movie called The Bob and Larry Movie. The film was going to focus on how Bob and Larry met and how they got their own show, and answer the question of why there are a bunch of talking fruits and vegetables in the first place. The film was even going to feature humans.

Concept art for The Bob and Larry Movie.

Problem is, in 2002, Big Idea Productions fell into bankruptcy, and the film was deemed too expensive and put on hold. The second VeggieTales movie wound up being 2008's The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie.

Never saw this one. It has a forty-three percent "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, make of 
that what you will.

27) Remember the impoverished family seen in Madame Blueberry? The mom and dad are modeled after Phil and Lisa Vischer, and their daughter Shelby provides the voice of the daughter, Annie.

28) One of the segments in Sheerluck Homes and the Golden Ruler is a Don Quixote parody starring Archibald Asparagus and Mr. Lunt as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza respectively. Originally, Bob was going to play Don Quixote, but since the very same video also featured a segment with Larry and Bob as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, they decided to have someone else play the character - Robert Lee, who did the initial screenplay, suggested Archibald. They also originally wanted to give the segment a sci-fi theme with futuristic windmills, but then Disney's Treasure Planet came out and they had to rework the idea.

Concept art for Sheerluck Homes.

29) How did Mike Narwoski come up with "Dance of the Cucumber", the Silly Song featured in Rack, Shack and Benny? Well, he and his wife were listening to a song called "Los Americanos" in the car, and his wife, who can speak Spanish, was translating it for him. To Mike, it felt like she was making fun of him, and he thought it would be funny to have Bob translating a song that Larry was speaking in Spanish - with Larry making fun of Bob. Also, apparently the background in the song was inspired by a mural that was hanging in Mike's house at the time.

30) The 2005 video Lord of the Beans resulted in Phil Vischer getting a cease-and-desist letter from New Line Cinema, who were annoyed at the show parodying Lord of the Rings without their permission.

31) For a while, VeggieTales was represented at Dollywood. They had a live show featuring the characters and an attraction called VeggieTales Side Show Spin, which was a kiddie coaster with a statue of Bob and Larry dressed as carnival barkers in the center. At some point they removed the VeggieTales theming and just called the ride Side Show Spin for a while. Then they eventually removed the ride altogether.

Today, there are no VeggieTales attractions at any theme park. To my knowledge, anyway. If there's a small, little-known theme park somewhere on this planet that has a ride featuring Bob and Larry, please let me know.

32) Rack, Shack and Benny ends with Bob stuck in the kitchen sink. Big Idea got letters from fans complaining that it was really inconsiderate of Larry to leave Bob in the sink. Presumably, these fans were satisfied when the next video, Dave and the Giant Pickle, showed that Bob got out of the sink somehow.

33) At some point, there were actually VeggieTales-branded seed packets - pumpkin seeds, tomato seeds, zucchini squash seeds, all of them with Bob, Larry, and/or some other character from the series on them. I wonder if any of the kids who bought the seeds were hoping that the veggies they'd grow from them would talk and sing Silly Songs like the VeggieTales cast...

34) And finally, in today's edition of "People Getting Offended By Completely Harmless Things", students at Cal State San Marcos claimed in a 2018 "Whiteness Forum" that VeggieTales was racist because the bad guys all had ethnic accents while the good guys sounded "white". "When kids see the good white character triumph over the bad person of color character they are taught that white is right and minorities are the source of evil," was their claim. This, despite the fact that the characters are TALKING PRODUCE and ergo don't actually have races. Or do they?

Sources:
- Phil Vischer's autobiography Me, Myself and Bob (you can find it online via Google Books)
- The various DVD commentaries
- This article

Oh, one more thing - I know this isn't really a "fun fact", I want to tell you about Nathan Cho. I stumbled upon this guy in 2017... a year earlier, he decided to start making videos that are live action recreations of songs from VeggieTales, with him playing all the characters. I highly recommend checking his stuff out. He puts a lot of energy into these videos.

Here's a link to his YouTube channel.