Clem Jackson met with Phil Vischer at the launch of ‘What’s in the Bible’ to find out more about his journey from bankruptcy to a new direction in storytelling.
Phil Vischer is best known to millions of children worldwide as the voice of ‘Bob the Tomato’ in his creation ‘Veggietales’ which catapulted him into global consciousness as the man who made Bible stories and biblical truths a veritable feast for children and their teachers alike.
But having created a global business it all collapsed following an acrimonious lawsuit the USA in 2003, resulting in bankruptcy for Vischer and the loss of his company Big Idea Productions and the Veggietales brand. You can read the whole story in his book ‘Me, Myself & Bob’ (Thomas Nelson / 9781595551221 / 2008).
Vischer didn’t dwell for too long on his misfortune having lost everything but went back to seek out what it was that God wanted him to do. The result is Jelly Telly and the recently released DVD series, ‘What’s in the Bible?’.
Launched in the UK at CRE in May, the third DVD in the series is due for release in the UK this month by Kingsway. I met up with Phil at CRE to find out more about his journey and the new cast of characters he has created. I began by asking about Jelly Telly.
PV: Well that’s a whole other thing. It’s actually the same characters as ‘What’s in the Bible’ but the idea is to be able to interact with kids daily, on-line. So www.jellytelly.com is just trying to create a mini-‘Nickleodeon’ , a mini CBeebies for Christian families. Kids can go there every day and watch about 20 minutes of video clips that we’re creating which teach the books of the Bible, that teach science from a biblical perspective, all sorts of different stuff.
CJ: Which brings us quite nicely to ‘What’s in the Bible’. You’re known as the creator of ‘Veggietales’ and yet in this new venture there isn’t a vegetable in sight?
PV: ‘No vegetables were harmed in the making of this programme’. No I needed to develop a new cast of characters that we could use really easily for different things; on-line, for YouTube, for DVDs. My two heroes growing up were Walt Disney and Jim Henson. Veggietales was kind of my attempt to be like Walt, build an animation studio and see how high we could push the bar’. But then you back up and see that with Kermit the Frog you could host live TV – you can actually sit down and talk to a kid with a puppet, things you just can’t do with animation.
This is our effort to say ‘let’s do simpler characters that we can very easily create a lot of content with so that we can literally talk to kids every day. They’re all basic Muppet-style puppets which are just fun.
I made my first animated film when I was eight but I started playing with puppets when I was six, when my grandfather bought me my first puppet. Computer animation is so similar to puppeteering, you can get them to do exactly what you want but you lose the immediacy of real puppets.
CJ: What attracted you at the age of six to puppets and then animation?
PV: If I was an extrovert I’d be an actor - that’s what it is. Animators and puppeteers are shy performers who don’t want to stand up there in front of the spotlight and goof off. When I was six I used to like to hide behind the couch, put a puppet on my hand and make my parents laugh. So for me animation and puppetry are the same, it’s being a clown through something else.
And I like teaching, I like explaining things through story, because it brings the fact to life in a sense. So it’s one thing to say ‘here’s what gravity is’, it’s another thing to drop a rock on someone’s toe. You know, tell the story of how gravity affects us and it means a lot more to me.
CJ: Can you explain a little about your journey from climbing the Veggietales mountain, falling off and then coming back?
PV: Over a seven-year period we went from penniless starving artists trying to get going, with two employees in a storefront, to the biggest animation studio between the coasts in the USA. We had 210 employees turning out feature films, theme-park rides, a live touring show, toys, books, music, movies, the lot. I was trying to build a ‘Disney company’ almost overnight because my thought was that this was God’s will, this will be pleasing to him because it will do so much good so he will show up and make it work.
Three years later I was sitting in the back of a bankruptcy courtroom watching everything get sold off at a public auction. And what God showed me was how miserable I had become because I was rolling this huge boulder up a hill that he had never called me to roll. God never said ‘you have to be Walt Disney’. I was a shy kid, a middle kid, I wasn’t sure who I was and so I just picked someone, I’m going to be Walt Disney and then everyone will like me! We can so easily tangle what we feel God is calling us to be with our own insecurities about what we want to be.
So God had to unwrap that, he literally had to haul me apart from my misperceptions about his call for my life. And he pointed out to me that I had made the work I was doing for him more important than my relationship with him.
CJ: So when it all collapsed what did you think then?
PV: I thought I had to reconsider my premises about God, I thought I’d misunderstood something fundamental and needed to figure out what it was. It didn’t threaten my faith, it threatened my understanding of what God wanted me to do.
CJ: But when you consider the millions of children who have been impacted by that Veggietales your not saying it was a mistake are you?
PV: No, not at all. I realised that what I was all bent up about wasn’t Veggietales, it was Big Idea Productions; my ‘Disney’, my animators, my studio etc. And so why didn’t God save it? Well he never asked me to make it in the first place. He asked me to tell stories, and none of those stories have gone away, they’re all still there and every year new kids are being introduced to Bob and Larry, which is awesome.
I remember that at one point I was beating myself up that I had let myself lose it all and I literally heard God say to me, ‘Everything I wanted to do with Veggietales was accomplished’. Basically, I had done everything that he had wanted me to do and that was such a peace-giving thing.
CJ: You’ve described the Bible as the most widely owned and least widely read book so how do see ‘What’s in the Bible’ helping to attack that?
PV: There are so many great Christian books, great commentaries, study guides, we’ve got all the knowledge but it’s all locked up in the printed page, and in the USA most Americans don’t read books anymore. 90% of Christian books are read by 10% of Christians, that’s the reality – so it’s the same people reading every new book. At the same time half of the adult Protestants in the USA can’t define the word ‘grace’ and that’s pretty basic.
We have a huge problem within the church, we’re failing to live the gospel. But I can’t go to a 40 year-old dad and say, ‘You don’t know your faith so I’m going to explain it to you’, because he’s going to say ‘Firstly, I grew up going to church, I know all that stuff, and secondly there’s a game on TV and I’m really very busy’. But if I go to him and say ‘I want to help you pass on your faith to your kids’, he says ‘Oh man that’s great because I have no idea how to do that’.
So now I have an opportunity not only to talk to the kids but also to their dad too. And if I do it cleverly enough mom and dad will sit down on the couch and halfway through dad will lean over and say ‘you know, I don’t even think I knew that’. That’s what I’m trying to do.
CJ: You mentioned about following a dream and then that may not be what it’s all about. There will be people in our industry who believe that what they are doing is what God wants them to do and yet it’s really hard at the moment. What would your message be to them?
PV: What I’ve learned to do is to remember very specifically what God has called me to do. It’s very easy for us to put other things onto that and the calling gets very specific over time; ‘He called me to tell stories, he called me to tell computer animated stories … with my own animation studio … in a really nice building’ and so it goes on. The same thing can happen in retailing; ‘he called me to serve the church ... in this neighbourhood … in this store … to those people … with this shelving and store layout’. But what did God actually tell you to do? Serve the church? Hang on to that tightly, hold everything else loosely.
