2 of 6
In addition to witty dialogue, songs set the silly tone for each video. The songwriters, chiefly Vischer and Nawrocki, imitate melodies that resemble anything from Mozart to Motown, providing further appeal for adult viewers. One of the best-known Veggie songs occurs in Rack, Shack, and Benny, a video that reworks the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In this episode, the misguided Nebby K. Nezzer, the head of a chocolate factory, commands his workers to bow down before a 90-foot-tall chocolate bunny and sing the highly infectious "Bunny Song":
The bunny, the bunny—
Whoa! I love the bunny
I don't love my mom or my dad, just the bunny
The bunny, the bunny, whoa,
I love the bunny
I gave everything I had for the bunny.
I don't want no health food
when it's time to feed
A big bag o' bunnies is all that I need!
I don't want no buddies to come out and play
I'll sit on my sofa, eat bunnies all day.
I won't go to church! And I won't go to school!
That stuff is for sissies, but bunnies are cool!
Due to parents' complaints, the recent edition of Rack, Shack, and Benny now contains a "new and improved" and much tamer "Bunny Song": "soup or my bread" replaced "mom or my dad" and the penultimate line became "I won't eat no beans, and I won't eat tofu." Interestingly, the goal of creating humorous material for children carries the risk of subverting the biblical values the videos hope to transmit. The producers of VeggieTales are willing to change material in order to keep parents watching.[3]
I was keen to take out a VeggieTales video each Sunday, but Anna often found the dialogue to be too fast paced. As my wife, Rita, and I had adopted a "no regular TV" policy, Anna also wasn't used to the "Saturday morning fun" of kids' programming. Anna and her younger sister Isabelle finally began to show a real interest in VeggieTales after our church library closed for renovations. We made do with weekly rentals of educational videos from the public library, such as the modestly interesting Let's Build a Sandcastle, until my wife purchased some videos of our own, including a VeggieTales episode that our girls have since memorized.
An exception to the "no regular TV" rule arose when Rita, who was at home with our children, began to take a coffee break in the company of Martha and her television show. The girls watched as well and began to ask after breakfast, "Is it Martha Stewart time?" The mornings that I am at home, I will join them at the TV and attempt to continue my grading or course preparation. I get little done as Martha will often present an interesting report on the making of chocolate Easter bunnies and Japanese wall screens, or the harvesting of cranberries or almost any topic I have ever wondered about.
I am at heart, though, a VeggieTales fan, and it was Rita who really brought Martha home for dinner. When I asked her to summarize her interest in Martha Stewart, she replied: "creativity, quality, and curiosity." Martha gives her new ideas for projects in areas such as cooking, gardening, and home decorating. Martha's media products also provide relief from country kitchen kitsch and Christian woman cute. When I raised the charge that Martha's sort of living promotes uppity materialism and the wasting of one's life on intricate crafts, Rita replied that she leaves aside or adapts projects that are either too time-consuming or too expensive for our budget. Finally, the documentary impulse in Martha's television show satisfies my wife's desire to "learn something new," as the program's introduction declares.
share this page
RSS Feed
