Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
It might be OK to show Madonna hanging on a mirrored cross, but don’t dare let Bob and Larry tell kids that God loves them.
The wildly popular VeggieTales kids videos about vegetables who talk and sing and act out Bible stories are being edited for their run on NBC’s Saturday morning educational program time, and the network says it’s because of time limits.
But the creator says that’s not exactly the case, and viewers will have to decide for themselves whether the result is good or bad.
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“VeggieTales was originally created for home video and, in most cases, each episode is over 30 minutes long. As it appears …. VeggieTales has been edited down for broadcast without losing any of its core messages about positive values,” the network said.
Phil Vischer, the co-creator of the characters, said that comment was “interesting.”
“As a guy deeply involved with the project, I know that statement is false,” Vischer wrote on his own weblog. “We sent them our first episode for TV, which was already edited to EXACTLY the right length, and they rejected it because, at the end, Bob the Tomato said, ‘Remember kids, God made you special and he loves you very much.’ They demanded we remove that line. The show wasn’t too long, it was too religious.”
He said the second also was sent edited for perfect timing. The response from NBC was an e-mail with a list of lines that needed to be removed, “each of them containing either the word ‘God’ or ‘Bible,'” Vischer wrote.
My first reaction was to wonder why NBC felt it needed to lie to the public about what it was doing. Vischer himself had no problem with meeting the standards, as long as NBC was being honest about it. Apparently, now they are. Vischer wrote:
So they’re being clear now, which is good. Whether or not you agree with their standards or the other shows they air is really a separate issue. They obviously have the right to set their own standards and apply them however they choose. I just wanted to make sure everyone was being upfront about the situation, because, well, I like it when we’re all being upfront.
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