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Big Idea Entertainment

VeggieTales

Computer-animated vegetables retell Bible stories and original fables, with a silly song in the middle and a moral at the end. It ran for decades in several forms and is the default Christian children's video in a great many homes.

ProvisionalFamily & childrenNon-denominational
Where to watch

Why this is listed

Listed because it is already in the house, not because it is the best thing here. If a family is watching it anyway, they should watch it knowing what it is: very good comedy, real craft, and a weaker theology than its reputation suggests.

Before you press play

The Bible stories are retold with heavy anachronism — Daniel's accusers sing, the Israelites are peas, Goliath is a pickle — and several of the best-loved episodes are original fables with no biblical text behind them at all. Nothing here will frighten a three-year-old; the risk runs the other way, that a child learns the joke version of Jonah before the real one and cannot later hear the story straight. Phil Vischer, who created it, has said publicly that it drifted into teaching moralism rather than the gospel. Take that as the note it is.

Suited to Young children. Age judgements are ours, not a rating board’s — you know your own family.

How to start

  1. Open veggietales.com (opens an external site) and read what Big Idea Entertainment says about itself before you read anything else.
  2. Read the note above first. It is there so an evening does not go wrong twenty minutes in.
  3. Watch it yourself before you watch it with children, if there are children.
  4. Read the passage it dramatises alongside it. The point is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.
  5. Afterwards, ask what the story added and what it left out. That conversation is worth more than the film.

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