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When I had graduated from pre-med, my mom bought me a nice leather-bound edition of Gray's Anatomy. I almost went to medical school just because of that book. They paid a lot of money for that book. But they were really supportive, of course.

Most people, when I told them "I'm not going to go to medical school; I'm going to animate vegetables," were kind of like, "Are you sure you want to do that?" But I really did feel strongly that we had an opportunity to tell stories with the biblical worldview and be really entertaining. So we had something.

Why vegetables?

The biggest thing in computer animation at the time, and this was before Toy Story and before any computer animated series came out, was the scrubbing bubbles commercial on TV. That shows you where the technology was at the time.

Like the scrubbing bubbles, we needed characters that were relatively easy to animate. So we thought they can't have any arms or legs, any clothes or any hair. And so just naked vegetables were all we needed. So that's what we chose.

Did you know it was going to take off the way it did?

It was a very gradual thing. We were starving for the first four years, after the first tape, because basically our strategy for the first show was to take out ads in Christian parenting magazines. We received five hundred orders for our first tape, which didn't quite cover the $70,000. So it was a little bit of a flawed business plan. But then Word Records picked us up.

How did Bob and Larry come about?

A lot of it just had to do with our personalities and how we related with each other.

With Bob and Larry, we wanted to create characters that were sort of reflections of our own personalities. Phil and Bob are both very driven. And Larry and Mike are a bit more laid back. And so we just thought we would be a really good combination.

As part of raising funds for our first show, we did a small piece called Take 38. It's basically Bob trying to sell the world on his grand scheme for this vegetables series that was going to change the world and win him a Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, Larry's in back of him looking for his plastic windup lobster and ends up pinching Bob in the nose at the end. So it's sort of that dynamic, that serious, driven personality next to the kind of happy-go-lucky type of personality.

There's something about Larry's eyes and his expressions. There's a sadness there, but it's goofy at the same time.

That was very intentional. I think Larry kind of really lives in the moment. The style of music [in one video is] tango. And if you've ever watched tango before, nobody smiles. It's very serious. So my direction to the animators for that whole piece was that it's a really goofy song, but Larry is not going to smile through the whole thing. It really fit that style of music to have Larry's character really be a part of that whole mood.

But it's funny because people have asked me before "Can you laugh like Larry?" And I thought about it and said, "Larry's never laughed." It's really funny. There's never been a point where Larry has just done a big guffaw laugh. And I don't know why that is.

I guess the humor that people see in Larry is just within his character and kind of laughing at his character and himself rather than sort of a dialogue-based humor where he's cracking jokes and laughing.

Does your daughter like VeggieTales?

It's funny because she loved it when she was one-and-a-half to three. And she got into a little VeggieTales hibernation. Now she's kind of in recovery. It's to where that's what she wants to watch now. Her first preference is to pop on a VeggieTales' dvd or something.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46