Lessons from Bob the Tomato

Photo: Larry and Bob, Big Idea Productions, LLC

In 2014 I met a childhood hero. I met Bob the Tomato. Rather, I met the man who co-created Bob the Tomato, Larry the Cucumber, and all the other VeggieTales characters I grew to love in my childhood. Phil Vischer, the co-founder of VeggieTales, came to my university in 2014 to give a midweek talk. There was no way I was going to miss it. The talk was everything I could have hoped for and more. He spoke about the history of VeggieTales, what led him to create it in the first place, and gave me two specific lessons that still are profound in my life more than a decade later. The talk was insightful, funny, and nostalgic. Afterwards, he was invited to the animation department to give a more personal talk to everyone there. I am not an animator, but their section of the department was literally feet away from my film classroom, so like the responsible student I was, I skipped my class to go listen to him (no regrets). This instantly became one of the better days that I would ever have in college.

The things Phil Vischer said became things that I would remember to this day. It helps that I immediately wrote down some of it in the notes section of my phone. The first thing he said that still haunts me to this day is “just because you are working for God, doesn’t mean you are doing what God wants you to do.”  It reminded me of the story in 1 Samuel 15 of Saul when he was told by God, through Samuel, to wipe out the Amalakites. Saul wanted to be merciful, a seemingly good quality, and spare some of them. But this is not what God wanted him to do. So in being merciful, a thing God usually asks us to do, He was disobeying God. Thinking about all this caused me to strive to make sure that what I was doing, God was specifically calling me to do and not just good things in a Godly direction.

The second thing I will always remember is some advice he gave to people wanting to create Christian stories.  He said, “You need to care more about the character (of a movie or TV show) than the lesson. Let the lesson surprise the audience while they fall in love with the characters. Christian films have the hardest time with this.” 

It’s a surprisingly hard thing for Christian films to do because often we are too concerned with making sure people understand the lesson. “It has to be a sermon, how else will people encounter Jesus?!” The bible itself is a guidebook on how to live a righteous life. But instead of it being a list of lessons (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes notwithstanding), it is mostly a book of stories; of people who had to learn the lessons living their everyday lives. Additionally, we need to give people things they can relate to. Think of stories like the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Lost Sheep. Those were stories that the people could really understand and ruminate on but the lesson was buried behind characters they could relate to. To this day, those stories are still relevant. 

People need to have a character they can fall in love with, that’s one of the reasons the Hollywood movies that you like are so successful. This piece of advice Phil Vischer gave was something we who went to film school were all taught, so it wasn’t a big surprise for us. But it’s something we can easily lose sight of in our mission focused media. In the same way that missionaries should earn social capital in the place they are planted before they can teach anything, the characters in our stories need to earn the right to teach a lesson. But the lesson should always be secondary, otherwise the audience will feel like they were tricked into a sermon. It’s like the talk Phil Vischer gave was a case in point. I don’t really remember any other speakers in all my time at university. But Phil Vischer created characters that had earned the right to teach me a lesson, so when he came through the door to teach it, I was ready to listen.