NBC Edits Veggietales for Religion

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NBC edits VeggieTales for religion

Series' co-creator says fans unhappy

By Anita Wadhwani, The Tennessean, September 23, 2006

A creator of the animated Christian-themed VeggieTales series says NBC ordered some references to God and the Bible be chopped from the popular cartoon just before it made its Saturday morning network debut earlier this month.

Phil Vischer, co-creator and the voice of character Bob the Tomato, says he was taken by surprise just weeks before the show was to air by requests from network executives to cut dialogue mentioning God. The network replaced the show's signature sign off, "God made you special and he loves you very much," with "Thanks for coming over to my house, kids. See you next week."

And Vischer wrote on his Web site that NBC was making false statements by saying publicly that the cuts were made for length and not for religious content.

"The show wasn't too long," said Vischer, who was hired to pare the longer, original DVD episodes down to 23 minutes for the network. "It was too religious."

NBC said in a statement that it was "committed to the positive messages and universal values of VeggieTales. Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view."

A spokesman for Franklin-based Big Idea Productions Inc., which now owns the rights to the show and negotiated with NBC to air the edited versions, said the edited show still delivered the same message.

"While specific references were taken out, we still think the message remains true to the show's core values," said Terry Pefanis, chief operating officer. "It was not our intent to sell out, but to bring Veggie-Tales to a broader audience."

VeggieTales has been a hit with the under-age-8 crowd and their parents, selling 50 million DVDs since it was created in 1993. Its shows inject humor into Christian messages, sometimes re-enacting a biblical parable in modern times, and at other times offering plots imitating shows like "Gilligan's Island," but with vegetable characters talking about God. Its slogan is: "Sunday Morning Values, Saturday Morning Fun."

The DVDs have spawned a host of spin-off products such as CDs, T-shirts, Bible covers, puzzles and computer games. Its signature characters -- Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber -- sometimes appear as mascots at ballgames.

Vischer, who now works as a consultant for Big Idea Productions Inc., was hired to edit the fuller-length DVD shows into the 23-minute segments that could accommodate commercials that are required by network television.

The network was clear in the beginning that biblical verses routinely recited at the end of the episodes would have to be eliminated, Vischer said.

But two weeks before the Sept. 9 airing of its first episode, "Asparagus of LaMancha," he said, he learned that NBC was asking for more cuts in religious content.

Bob the Tomato's signature sign-off was the first to go, he said. Then he learned that NBC executives wanted other lines in the dialogue out as well.

Eliminated lines from one episode included "Calm down. The Bible says we should love our enemies."

In another episode, Vischer said, NBC allowed the line "the Bible says Samson got his strength from God." But the next line -- "And God can give us strength, too" -- was out.

The changes included cuts in dialogue where characters utter the word "God" and were so last-minute and awkward, Vischer said, that in some cases "it makes the stories not work very well."

For the sign-off, where the original words were simply voiced-over, "the lips don't match, so it kind of looks like a Japanese cartoon with lips moving" out of synch with the words, he said.

"It seems like its OK to talk about the Bible or God as a historical story, but not to give it any application to daily life," Vischer said. "As long as major media is programmed out of New York and L.A., where church attendance is lower than elsewhere, I guess you're not going to see a whole lot of healthy depictions of religion on TV."

Vischer's Internet blog about the edits inspired a host of responses, he said, adding: "Fans are angry."

One television watchdog organization said slicing Christian references out of the Christian-based cartoon was like "Gunsmoke without the guns" or "Monday Night Football without the football."

The Los Angeles-based Parents Television Council wrote a letter to NBC asking the network to explain the edits, but a council spokeswoman yesterday said the group had not gotten any response.

Pefanis said the decision to rework the show for network television "weighed heavily on us."

The company is being paid only for the production costs of editing the show, he said.

"It wasn't done for financial reward," he said. "It was done to reach a broader audience." The company hopes the Saturday NBC version will inspire more sales of the DVDs with their full Christian content, he said.

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