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The Man Behind Bob and Larry Sounds Off On Today’s Media

In 1993, Phil Vischer launched what became a hugely popular series for kids called VeggieTales. Back in 2009, we talked with him about VeggieTales, his new venture JellyTelly and the challenges of guiding kids through the entertainment culture.

This time around, I wanted to talk with Vischer about the entertainment culture as a whole—and to better understand how a man who so creatively uses media to minister thinks about its overall power to shape people’s lives.

Bob Waliszewski: You wouldn’t have launched Veggie Tales, What’s in the Bible or JellyTelly if you didn’t believe the media could influence. How does that influence play out in real life?

Phil Vischer: I have seen kids apply lessons they’ve learned from my stories to remind their parents what the Bible teaches. I’ve seen little kids stand up in Sunday school classes to answer the question, Can you name one of the judges?  [They can] list every judge in chronological order because we put that into a song. Teaching is awesome, but there are lots of different ways to teach and we tend to oversimplify and say, Teaching is a person standing in front of other people talking. That is a form of teaching. It’s actually the form that’s been shown to be least effective of all the forms. So, telling a story which is what Jesus usually did or visualizing something which is what we do through the media now is much more effective as a way to teach.

Waliszewski: I find it almost unbelievable that there still are those who don’t believe the media can change behaviors or attitudes, positively or negatively. You believe it can do both. What concerns you about today’s entertainment?

Vischer: [The Greek philosopher] Plato … was so concerned about the influence of poets and storytellers that he moved that they be banished from Athens. He said, We want kids to grow up with the beliefs that will lead to a stronger society, and storytellers are being irresponsible and they should be banished. That was 300 years before Jesus. People were concerned about the media. So, we need to be concerned about the media. Because what we value is shaped by the stories.

We need to teach our kids [about] the narrative of the world we actually live in—a world that has the potential to be amazing, but is broken by sin. If you have the proper narrative then you know how to interpret the events that you’re bumping into. If we don’t pass on to our kids a Christian worldview and that kind of narrative then they just pick up a narrative from television or from music or more and more today from video games. Those narratives tend to be extraordinarily self-obsessed and self-serving and do not lead to healthy lives.

Waliszewski: What are you most excited about when it comes to today’s entertainment?

Vischer: Probably the most exciting thing is the access that more and more voices have to the media now because anyone can put up their own channel on YouTube. Anyone can be a storyteller. Thirty years ago only a handful of people in the country had access to a huge audience. Now my kids have access to a huge audience. If they do something weird enough on YouTube they could get a million views in 24 hours. The potential of voices that the mainstream media doesn’t consider competent or acceptable to get access to a large audience is just unprecedented.

Now this [can be used] for good and for bad. This works for Al Qaeda as well as it works for the Southern Baptists. We’re in a place that’s rife with potential energy, and it can go positive and it can go negative, because the same media that can spread the Gospel spreads jihadism, spreads pornography, spreads the disregard of women and minorities. The media’s become more and more powerful because it is in everyone’s pocket now.  Anywhere you are if you’re bored you pull out the media and absorb some and what you’re absorbing shapes who you are.

Waliszewski: None of us have any crystal ball. But looking at the trends, where do you think we’re going in the future when it comes to media? Again, what concerns you? What jazzes you?

Vischer: The concerning part is probably the dumbing down of popular media which has been constant for a long, long time and the lowest common denominator. … You might have had Johnny Carson 30 years ago make a risqué joke and good Christian folks might have said, Oh, that’s not appropriate. But now, there are whole cable networks full of jokes that would have made Johnny Carson absolutely blush. Because our kids grow up steeped in this, there’s just a coarsening of narrative, a coarsening of our civil conversation. A musical like the Book of Mormon is fantastically funny and shocking in the sense that of how much that it’s making fun of a group of people for their beliefs and everyone is okay with that. …  Are we really comfortable with the way we rip people apart if they’re different than us? This is not how a society comes together.

What’s encouraging again is the ability to get more varied voices out there. I know of at least 20 Christian colleges now with full-time film programs that are graduating good Christian kids that want to affect the media. And because of Netflix, because of Amazon Prime, because of YouTube, because of Vimeo, because of all these services, they can make an inexpensive film and get it up in front of as many people as are interested in watching it.

…We sent [the first VeggieTales episode] to PBS to see if they would air that sort of thing. The answer was Absolutely not, this is religious. That has no place on PBS. In fact, one PBS station said, in fact it is our duty in the public trust to make sure that things like this don’t get broadcast.  At that point we were done.  It was just VHS cassettes and Christian bookstores. Those were the only options. Today you just say, Ha, I don’t care. I don’t need PBS. I’m just gonna put it up on YouTube. You can get a better audience on YouTube than you could 30 years ago on PBS. That part is encouraging. But again, that works just as well for Al Qaeda just as well as it does for me.