The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything… and, Apparently, That Includes Talking About God
January 21, 2008
This evening I took Sophia and one of her friends to see the latest offering from Big Idea, a full length feature film titled “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie.”
When I first heard about the movie, I was excited. But after the initial excitement wore off and I started to think about it, I became concerned. I just couldn’t see how they would combine the characters of lazy pirates with a Biblical message. However, Veggie Tales has presented Biblical stories in all sorts of odd venues — like turning the story of Moses and the Exodus into a western and the Prodigal Son into a Wizard of Oz parable — so I clung to the hope that a meaningful, Scripture-based message would be presented.
As you may have guessed from the title of this post, I was disappointed. The movie was funny (both girls laughed out loud at various points in the movie), suspenseful (Sophia clung to me in all the tense parts), and silly (man-eating cheese curls). But it was not spiritual. It was not uplifting. It lacked the “Sunday Morning Values” on which Veggie Tales built its audience; instead, all of this film’s creative efforts were focused upon providing the “Saturday Morning Fun” part of the equation.
Following in the footsteps of the sale of Veggie Tales to a mainstream corporation, and the cartoons’ subsequent appearance on network television (sans any reference to God), I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But I had hoped for (and expected) better from the people at Big Idea. I knew they had sold their company, but I had hoped that they hadn’t sold out.
It’s a sad day when the loudest voice for Christian children’s entertainment decides to go mainstream and forsake not only their values, but also their core audience.
Well at the end of the day, I guess we have to understand that it’s all about business, which is sad in this case, but it’s true. My biggest grip about Christan Media is that no one really supports it, well at least not like it should be. The last Veggie Tales movies did well, roughly around 26-33 million bucks, which is excellent in general, but very poor in the business side of things. That’s about 6 million tickets so for that movie. We know there are more than 6 million Christian kids and parents out there, why so low numbers? Lack of support, lack of interest? Typical Christian Media.
This time around I think the attempted to make the more a little more broarder. I understand it’s hard to compete with the Shreks and the Pixar movies, who make more in one day than say Veggie Tales does total.
Money shouldn’t matter, yes I know, in this case it’s all about spreading the gospel. But hey it’s how things are…
So… are we happy we didn’t do a promo for this thing then?