This is The Babylon Bee Interview Show. Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle talk to Larry the Cucumber voice and VeggieTales co-creator and Mike Nawrocki! Mike is a director, producer, writer, voice actor, animator, musician, puppeteer, and assistant professor of Film and Animation at Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN. Kyle, Ethan, and Mike give you the Babylon Bee exclusive behind-the-scenes look into the world of VeggieTales! Mike is also the author of a series of children's books called The Dead Sea Squirrels—out now! You can find more from Mike Nawrocki at Facebook and Instagram. Pre-order the new Babylon Bee Best-Of Coffee Table Book coming in 2020! Get a Sneak Peak! If you are hurting financially right now, check out our $100,000 COVID relief fund set up by Seth Dillon which you can find out more about by contacting us at our website. If you need financial help contact us! Also donate if you are able to chip in to help! Topics Discussed How the original VeggieTales became a huge sensation How Ethan ruined VeggieTales with In The House Kyle and Ethan give Mike free creative advise and character ideas Mike's new books The Dead Sea Squirrels Subscriber Portion (Begins at 00:42:37) Does he have any thoughts on Phil Vischer's comments where he regrets aspects of VeggieTales? Bacon Bill and MeatyTales We get Larry the Cucumber to read some Bible verses you've never heard him read before! The entire interview is available for Babylon Bee subscribers only… Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
All right, and we are here.
This is the first time we've had a lot of humans on our show, but this is the first time we've ever talked to a cucumber.
But we have an actual cucumber on the show.
And he's not only that, like, there's cucumbers, but then this cucumber is an avowed Christian.
Which is pretty rare in the cucumber community because I don't even know if Jesus died for cucumbers.
But anyway, welcome to the show.
Hey, Ethan!
Hey, Kyle!
How are you guys doing?
He's doing the voice.
Oh, my gosh.
You're not going to make me talk like this the whole time, are you?
I would really like it.
I think I might have just, I had to pop my audio down because I think that's going to be distorted anyway.
That's going to be like Larry Rage Core.
Yeah, he's always about 40 dB higher than my speaking voice.
So do they do any effect on Larry or do you purely do that with your throat?
No, well, so we do a little bit of pit shifting on most of the voices.
Both Bob and Larry go up to semitones, I think.
It's very complicated.
It's technical, but they go up a little bit.
And then the French P's go up even more.
Oh, the French peas.
Yeah, because they're smaller.
So yeah, we've done, you know, over the years, pit shifting on the characters and sort of kind of tried to find a good spot for them.
And actually, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything movie, we pitch shifted them less than they normally are.
And I think with Veggie Tales in the House, if I'm not wrong, those maybe weren't pitch shifted at all.
I can't remember.
So it's.
How dare you even.
How dare you even mention the name of Veggie Tales in the house.
Peresi.
So this is Mike Naraki.
Just everybody knows.
It's the human behind Larry.
The cucumber.
Hello.
Hello, everybody.
Human.
Well, no, that's my cucumber portion.
That's not my human portion.
I'll stick with the yellow.
You have a portion?
I always thought it was the voice you didn't realize that you actually part cucumber.
Wow.
Yeah, I'm getting a very like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde vibe here.
Yeah, that's true.
He looks as cat legs.
He looks just two cucumbers for fully cucumber and fully human.
It's the hypostatic contract.
Something.
Yeah, so back in like 1995, my uncle, who's a pastor, brought over this VHS tape for us.
He said, you guys got to check this out.
It's Christian humor.
Like a Christian cartoon, but it's good.
Had to offer that as a qualifier.
Yeah, you know, and we're like, no, it's no, it's not going to be.
We, from past experience, we know this is.
Yeah, we've heard that one before.
We've been fooled many times.
But no, I think the first Veggie Tales I saw was Are You My Neighbor, if I remember right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I think that was the second one that we did.
Somewhere on there.
That was our sophomore attempt, and some things were more successful than others in that one.
And it was just incredible.
I mean, just the use of CGI, and it had never been done really on that scale or timeframe.
And it was incredible to us, you know, as kids to see something like, oh, this is, and this is Christian, but it's actually funny.
You know, so.
Oh, man.
Well, thank you, man.
No, I appreciate that.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, going back and watching those early episodes, I mean, CGI has come so far.
But I just remember at the time, it was such a cool new look that, you know, we were able to get away with, you know, just not very good art, which would be considered today.
I go back and look at those.
I'm like, oh.
But at the time, it looked great.
But those are the original, those are the original designs as God intended them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, and if you look at them, if you go to look at the early Pixar stuff, like Tin Toy and Rhett's Dream, some of those early Pixar films, you'll notice that the eyes and the mouth, we took the Pixar eyes and mouth and just slapped them on vegetables.
So John Lasseter gets some big kudos there too.
So even Veggie Tales was just the Christian version of something.
Well, there's nothing new under the sun.
It's all about combining things in creative ways.
I work.
I run the Christian version of the onion.
We're all knockoffs here.
That's right.
Well, you, well, I know we're having you on because, well, just because you're awesome and you're Larry.
But you got some things going on.
You got a book series you're doing called The Dead Sea Squirrels.
Yeah, The Dead Sea Squirrels.
I'm excited about that.
We just released books five and six in that series.
So the first four have been out for a few months now.
But I can tell you a little bit about that if you guys want.
It sounds violent.
Like, what happened to these squirrels?
No, it's geographical.
Yeah.
So the dead.
It's amazing.
Floating corpses of many squirrels out in the sea of blood.
Sorry, no, it's not really.
Don't really think that means it's about the Dead Sea.
So it's basically like, you know, Encino man meets the Bible, meets squirrels.
So the premise is that Michael, he's a 10-year-old little boy, just about ready to start fifth grade.
He is spending the summer with his dad, who's an anthropologist, on the banks of the Dead Sea.
And Michael brought his buddy Justin along there in the same grade.
And Michael and Justin are exploring a cave in the Dead Sea, and they come upon on their last day there, and they come upon these two salt-encrusted, dehydrated squirrels.
And Michael thinks that they're amazing and will make them the most famous kids in the fifth grade if they bring those home as souvenirs.
And he stashes them in his backpack.
Yeah, they're like petrified.
They're dead as doornails.
So at least he thinks.
But then he brings them back and sets them up on his dresser under his window with the window open.
And they get rained on and rehydrate and come back to life.
And so the concept is they're the kooky grandparents that he never had that actually lived during the time of Christ.
It's an old Jewish couple named Merle and Pearl Squirrel.
And so they have a lot of wisdom to share from the olden days.
So they're kind of fish out of water in the modern world.
And then Michael's trying to get used to them and there's a big international incident that goes on because they were smuggled out of the country.
And so it's a whole lot of fun.
But each episode, like Veggie Tales, has a core value at the center.
And then there's a story that revolves around that value in that Bible verse.
So that's what the books are about.
And it's fun.
So they're early readers for first through fifth grade.
And I've really been enjoying writing those.
Cool.
Yeah, kids are a great audience.
Like getting feedback and finding out, you know, you get that, there's just a difference.
Like, cause I've done comics for more older people, like, you know, adults.
And when you get a guy that comes up to you and he's like, yeah, I'm 37 years old and I like have read your book 35 times.
I'm like, well, you really should get a job or like.
And then when like a kid, you know, parents are like, my five-year-old has me read this to him every night before bed.
We've read it so many times.
That's so much more rewarding to me.
He's like, oh.
Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that at all.
It just feels great.
I think the five-year-old should get a job, to be honest.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Go make some iPhones.
No, I love that.
I love that.
Yeah.
No, it's really, it's been fun.
And, you know, the series has just been out, but, you know, some early, you know, early feedback that I've been getting is just really, really wonderful.
And I, you know, I originally conceived it as an animated series.
And then, you know, I had a friend of mine who's also kind of, he's my agent, actually.
He's a literary agent.
He encouraged me to kind of try it as an early reader series.
And so it's the first book series I've ever written.
I'm mostly a screenwriter, but it's just been so much fun.
And now I'm going the other way with it.
I'm actually, you know, taking the books and now, you know, adapting them to screenplays and, you know, would love to get it animated one of these days.
So it's been a really fun process.
Yeah, these sketches of the characters are really cool.
It's like almost like a Scott Pilgrim style to the art here.
Very cool.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Luke McGee, who is the artist on that.
He's actually a Canadian guy who lives in Sweden.
But connected up with Luke through Tyndale, our publisher.
So yeah, he's super talented.
I'd love his style.
Well, we were inspired because we saw this title, The Dead Sea Squirrels, and we wanted to pitch some ideas to you for some other potential IP.
Yeah, you could either use these as like one of the books in the series or you could launch a spin-off.
So these are free ideas.
Free ideas for you.
All right.
All right, great.
I've got my pencil.
I'm going to write them down.
We're a fan of a good pun and especially a good Bible pun.
So we were immediately animal and Bible pun did see squirrels.
It really spoke to us.
So Sodom and Gamera.
Or no, Gamera.
So that's the giant mutant turtle that attacks cities.
So you just had a giant turtle eating Sodom.
Was that like in Godzilla?
Yeah, it's a Godzilla character.
The only characters I remember from Godzilla are Godzilla himself and Mothra.
Mothra.
Mothra.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For some reason, I remember Mothra.
I don't know if I remember that.
That's the only one I remember too.
That sounds like some kind of like fainting southern guy trying to say mother.
Mothra.
It's hot out here, Mothra.
Hotel that a Mothra.
So this could be another good early reader's book, The Song of Salamander.
Yeah.
The Song of Solomon.
There you go.
It'd be a little off-color.
Well, you know, I just remember.
You remember you have to be a chameleon book?
Our chameleon salamanders are the other way around.
No, they're amphibians, chameleons are reptiles, man.
Come on.
I just remember the glorious Veggie Tales episode where you told the story of David and Bathsheba with rubber duckies.
With rubber duckies.
Yep, absolutely.
And I think it was a few years later I realized, I was like, oh, the rubber duckies not actually.
We were very, very careful not to advertise that as part of the promotional marketing.
So we just kind of left it up as its own little fable.
And then people just caught on over the next few years.
All these kids grew up, got the talk from their parents who went back and watched the episode and realized.
Wait a minute.
Wait a second.
My favorite is kids who have young kids who have watched Lord of the Beans and then later have gotten older and watched Lord of the Rings and thought, wait a minute, they ripped that off from VeggieTales.
Are they thinking it's the other way around?
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
They ripped off Veggie.
Yeah.
Oh, that's exactly what he said.
That was your joke.
Stole his joke.
So we could get a little more existential with one of the more little darker books of the Bible, Ecclesiast Turtles.
Ecclesiastles.
Yeah.
Be careful how you pronounce that.
Turtles walking around.
Turtles walking around going, it's all meaningless, man.
It's all meaningless.
Speaking of nothing new under the sun.
Peeing in the wind.
Or whatever they say in that book.
Well, keeping the reptile theme going, the newt testament.
Newt is an amphibian, dude.
Isn't it a reptile?
No.
It's like an amphibious reptile.
Where do you see newts?
Hold on.
No.
It's in the water.
Well, this guy is like a reptile/slash amphibian expert here.
No, it's a big one.
I'm saying that the two are not mutually exclusive.
A newt is a salamander.
Which is an amphibian.
Hold on.
It's a long frog.
All right.
Keep going with the next one.
They seem slimy enough to be amphibians.
I go by the slime factor, whether they're amphibians or reptiles.
Okay, how about Samson and Delai Llama?
Delai Llama?
Yeah, not Delai Lama.
Delai Lama.
Okay, I like it.
All right.
All right.
Cal's still looking so much.
I got it.
Okay, he's got it.
The book of More Monkeys.
Mormon.
I don't think that's from our Bible, though.
The Book of Mormon.
Yeah, but he could reach out.
Yeah.
It's like an advantage audience.
Book of More Monkeys.
I feel like I need to come up with some myself.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendigopher.
No, he's just, he's just like, he's laughing because he's a nice guy.
You know, everybody's got their laughs.
My head is shaking.
What's sad is how much we laughed coming up with these.
Yeah.
Well, to be fair, we were in quarantine.
Yeah.
We were a little crazy.
We hadn't been around doing this for a while.
Yeah.
So now, are you guys in the studio right now?
Or are you doing this from your respective homes?
Or how are you all doing this?
Yeah, we are illegal right now.
Yeah, we've snuck into our little studio while you're running rogue.
Yeah.
But, you know, how close are you sitting together?
Four feet, three to four feet, maybe.
Yeah, yeah.
We're like Corey Tenboom right now.
We're in the hiding place.
I don't think that's comparable.
I never read it.
Never read it.
Did you guys see JoJo Rabbit?
Oh, yeah.
I want to.
I haven't seen it yet.
I did.
Oh, such a good movie.
Reminded me of the hiding place a little bit.
Oh, yeah.
But hey, so yeah, so I do a podcast called The Bible for Kids.
And tomorrow is going to be our, we normally record at a Way FM radio station here in the Nashville area.
But tomorrow we're going, we're going, you know, virtual with it.
So this is my first trial run in my office, you know, doing a podcast.
So it'll be fun to try.
Well, we weren't worried about us getting the virus from each other, but we were definitely worried about you.
So that's why we decided to have you on remotely.
Yeah.
So thank you.
I appreciate it.
You just seem like a kind of guy who carries a lot of diseases around.
What can cucumbers get, though?
Like an E. coli or pickles.
Pickles just.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Well, the vinegar helps with that, you know, from the pickle side.
You know, that is a preservative.
So, yeah, but so far, so far, I'm feeling good.
But yeah, I'm holed up.
And my wife and I and our two kids, we have, our kids are a little bit older.
They're home from college now.
So we're all gearing up for starting next week.
Actually, my daughter's already starting this week, you know, virtual school from home.
Virtual school.
She puts on her virtual reality goggles and she's like walking down a hallway.
Yeah.
Some other virtual reality guy dumps her books.
I don't think that's more of a school thing.
I didn't go to college.
I didn't go to college, so I just imagined.
You just have this vision image of what college is.
Older toys room.
Maybe, maybe 80s college.
That sounds like 80s college.
John Hughes College.
John Hughes is the closest we'll ever get to.
You can choose to go to 80s college when you do virtual college because you can just set it.
Oh, that's true.
You can set it right.
Yeah.
You can set the skin.
Okay, we'll rapid fire the rest of our pictures for you here.
Daniel.
Daniel and the Lemur's den.
That's more fun.
That's nice.
It doesn't sound quite as dangerous.
They just play with you.
Solomon's 700 wives and 300 porcupines.
That was a pity left from my father.
That sounds a lot more dangerous, actually.
That is a classic church dad joke.
That one.
That is good.
I like this one.
I like this one.
I'm the classic church dad.
John the Baboonist.
That's so stupid.
Did you write that one?
That's mine.
I snugged that one on there.
Wow.
Wow.
It sounds like a scientific specialty.
It almost sounds like somebody who hollowed out a baboon and made it into an instrument and plays it well.
I am an accomplished baboonist.
Or somebody who's raises baboons, I guess.
Doesn't be so morbid.
Or like, you know, puts on the suit for part of the empire mitzvahs.
They can be a baboon.
They can do a fill-in on movies that need baboons, but they don't want people getting their faces eaten off by a real baboon.
Mike, does Ethan like this?
Like when you guys were working on VeggieTale?
Oh, yeah, man.
Is this how he was?
It depends on the movie.
This is how he was.
He hasn't changed a bit.
I think it's probably been, what, four years?
It hasn't been that many years since I've seen you.
It's got to be around there, yeah.
Because I remember I was always counting down until all my health insurance I got from that job would run out.
And you actually, you lived in Nashville for a little bit, too.
I never did.
Eric moved to Nashville.
I just traveled there three or four times a year.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Because Eric, yeah, Eric was in the office right across from that's how I got dethroned from my story editor position because Eric was able to move out there.
So he took off to Nashville.
I had just had kids and everything.
I really can't move with our situation with having stepkids who are between different homes.
So I married into having stepkids.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Two more, two more.
Okay, all right, here we go.
The whore of Babelobster.
No, no comment.
Sorry.
You don't have to say anything.
Just keep laughing and shaking your head.
Bobby, maybe if you make the series for older kids.
Yeah, it's just ideas.
Or just a character.
Yeah, just ideas.
Just throw a character in there.
All right.
And the final.
The prophet Gerbil Maya.
Gerbilmaya.
Gerbs like Jerry.
Gerald's.
The best one for last.
Yeah, obviously.
Maybe.
Matter of opinion.
All right.
Well, you guys have got a future in Bible pun story writing.
All right.
With animals.
Oh, man.
Oh, hey, speaking of the old, speaking of the old big idea office, you know who's in there now?
Little thoughtless people.
Nope, nope.
Kingdom Studios.
You know those guys that they, well, I can only imagine they did that film.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, and I still believe that.
Wait, so that's gone?
Big ideas, the studio, the offices are gone now?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, they're gone.
Well, because so Veggie Tales in the House was the last production in there.
So when the DVD series wrapped, the final show that I worked on was The Noah Show.
That was our last DVD, which was in 2016.
So, yeah, so that's when I left.
And then when you all wrapped the Veggie Tales in the House series, that was it for those offices.
And so Leslie Farrell, who ran the office, now works for Universal Pictures.
That's who owns the IP of Veggie Tales.
And so, yeah, the office down there went away probably in 2017, something like that.
But yeah, but the Kingdom Studios guys are in there now.
So I got to go in there a few weeks ago and tour around.
And it looks totally different, but a lot better.
They did an amazing job with that space, but just a little bit of trivia there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we should talk about Veggie Tales in the House because I think a lot of people wonder what the heck happened there.
Oh, man.
Well, you know, I've got to say that, you know, just working with the folks that I worked with, I did, you know, Phil and I did voices for Veggies in the House.
And obviously, I think I wrote maybe two or three scripts.
You guys, you know, and I had fun writing.
Yeah, you wrote some scripts.
Yeah.
They were great.
But yeah, so it was just obviously, and I do run into people who are big fans of that iteration of Veggie Tales.
But I think the biggest issue that we came across was it just wasn't the Veggie Tales that people grew up and were used to and love.
And so there's some passionate feelings on that side about just about particularly what the characters look like.
But I have nothing but respect for the folks and particularly the whole crew that worked on that show was really, really great people, really great art.
Yeah.
The character design, the world design was all just wonderful.
It just wasn't what people were seeing with Veggie's.
It was just different.
Yeah.
Well, I think that the mindset of going in, I mean, it was a little weird because, I mean, it wasn't the old Veggie Tales.
They brought on Doug, who we had on the show, Doug Tnapel, as a showrunner.
And I think they were trying to, you know, maybe we should try it in a different flavor or something.
And he was coming from a different world.
He was coming from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network type shows.
And we wanted to try that.
We wanted to try a very snappy, comedic, short, because it was the format was more like a sitcom.
Right.
I think one thing a lot of people don't get about Veggie Tales is because you guys are doing almost exclusively like the direct-to-video movies for a while there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That was what our whole business model was built off of was just basically those little mini movies.
And so those each have a budget for very specific sets and characters and everything allotted.
People don't get about the show that we did for, which was for DreamWorks at the time, that there was a very small budget for the entire series.
And so every show we had to very pick and choose, very like, that became the biggest challenge off the bat.
Almost every idea you had got shot down by the budget.
Because in 3D animation, every single item you add costs money.
And so there's prop comedy almost as out the window.
A lot of comedy is out the window.
And so that was a huge challenge.
And a lot of the movies could build a biblical motif.
This is the Noah's Arkwin or this is this Bible story and have that whole, even if whether, whatever the story was, it felt very biblical because it had the Bible story thing built around it.
We could not do that ever in this show.
It had to all take place in their little world in that kitchen for the most part.
They could never travel to another world or act out a Bible story ever.
Just couldn't afford it.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, yeah, the challenges that you guys had to work under were pretty, pretty big.
And, you know, I do, I just, I just remember just thinking, oh my goodness, you know, these guys are just the work that they have to do, the amount of output that they have to create is just tremendous.
And I remember, you know, because we would do two to three Veggie Tales episodes a year at the most.
Yeah.
And really, you know, and the longest portion of that, even though they were longer to produce, the longest portion of that was in development, you know, because getting, breaking a story and being able to, you know, teach a lesson that comes out of a story and make sure that that feels, you know, authentic.
It's hard.
The teaching is correct.
It's really, it's a lot of work.
And so, but, and basically, you know, on this, the schedule that you all were on, you had to turn out like an episode a week for three years.
So one brand new one every week.
And there was times where multiple episodes had either been flat out rejected and we were doing complete rewrites.
And yeah, it was, it was hectic.
It was like this crazy, loosey conveyor belt.
And for both me and Eric, who are pretty much the key writers on the show, I mean, if you look at the credits, it's almost every episode is me or him writing it.
We were both very new to writing for animation or just writing under a deadline like that.
We'd written our own stuff.
So it was like, we got thrown in the deep end.
And it was, but also it's interesting, these stories behind the scenes, you know, there's a whole other story, which me and Doug often talk about.
You know, it's easy to want to say like, oh, God had this show created because it had this purpose to lead all these kids to Jesus.
And like, and who knows what, you know, maybe, but like there are behind the scenes stories.
Like for me, just alone, getting this job on Veggie Tales, I was, I had just gotten married.
I did not, you know, I was really kind of the tail end of Axe Cop was kind of fizzling out for me.
I didn't know where my next job was going to be.
I had no idea how I was going to provide health insurance to my family.
I didn't know, you know, and I had, I had gone to a friend of mine who's in animation who had also married into a family with instant family with kids already and stuff.
And it was a scary jump.
And I had said, you know, I've had this guilt about it.
Like, I don't have like an established career.
How can I support this family?
He said, his advice to me was like, if you have the, if you're the kind of person who will do whatever it takes to pay those bills at the end of every month, you know, that's what you need to be.
Like it's not having an established career in order to ever even raise kids.
Like you need, it's about who you know you're going to be.
And so I held on to that.
And I still had no idea how I was going to do it, but if I had to go flip burgers, I would.
Yeah.
And it was literally like, I think, I remember I was, I think I was at my wedding rehearsal or whatever, and I got a call from Doug.
It was like right in the midst of it all.
And he goes, hey, VeggieTales, I just got this pitch.
They got picked up.
He's like, I want you to write on it.
He's like, it's going to be your thing for a while.
Get ready.
Veggie Tales.
I'm like, okay.
Out of nowhere, I got this job that set us on this.
I mean, we were able to get a house out of it.
It helped us with getting our first child together.
It was a huge blessing.
Health insurance, a really nice health insurance for the family for a year.
So just that alone, even with whatever else was big.
It was really big for us.
And I think the whole crew, you know, there's the two twins who did the design on the show were very young, amazing artists.
Yeah.
And they got hammered for the redesigns.
But they were just being handy, you know, just like for me.
Did I set out?
Do I want to go change Veggie Tales?
I just got offered a job that I really needed and I was like happy to try it.
Same for them.
They were asked, can you try some redesigns?
And I thought they were beautiful redesigns.
Oh, yeah.
The art that those two do is just incredible.
I mean, they are just so supremely talented.
And both of them right now are working at DreamWorks Television.
They both moved out to LA to do that.
Yeah, I think we're working on trolls.
Last I heard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And just unbelievable artists.
And so, and that's the thing.
I mean, it's just, it was a, it was a different take, different style, a different voice.
It just, you know, it was just different.
And, and, yeah, you know, and wasn't what people wanted with the show.
So, yeah.
So, you, so you guys are, uh, you, are you part of the new show?
I assume, you're Larry.
Yeah, so the new show.
Yes, yep.
You guys are doing a new show that's a, I call it a deboot.
Deboot.
I love that.
Because the reboot has been rejected and we're debooting back.
Back to the old.
It's like when you want to reload back to the old, like you get with the new windows and you hate it.
So you go back to the old one.
The older one.
Right?
Right.
I don't know.
The term, I think I want to, the term free peat.
I don't know if that comes from.
Free Pete.
Yeah.
It's when you want to go back to the old one and it's free.
I don't know.
No, I'm totally kidding because it looks beautiful.
Can you leave the puns to Ethan, please?
Yeah, I'm a dude.
He got the Dead Sea Squirrels.
I am a dad.
I am qualified for the puns.
Yeah, Veggie Tales, the whole thing just seems like it was written by dads telling dad jokes.
Yeah, absolutely.
A lot of the voices.
Absolutely.
Oh, man.
No, but no, yeah.
So you're right.
We are writing new shows.
So there's going to be 26 new episodes.
TBN actually licensed Veggie Tales through Universal, who still owns the IP.
And they put together a little production group in Southern California where they are running the pre and post-production and then overseeing animation.
But they've contracted Phil and I for writing and for voices.
And Kurt Heineke, who did the original music for Veggie Tales, he's back on there.
So it's been a lot of fun.
And we actually were almost ready.
I had a voiceover session for show 26 actually scheduled for last week that got pushed because of all the craziness in the world right now.
But those are on their way and they should start releasing later this year.
So what is your theory about why?
Sorry, I keep stealing questions from Kyle here.
I'll go for him.
In Veggie Tales in the House, it's an empty house full of living vegetables.
It's clearly a house that was at least once owned by humans.
That's right.
So do you think it's this post, like the, you know, after Christ came back, everybody's gone, the apocalypse happened.
It's a post-tribulation.
Yeah, and all the vegetables came to life.
Maybe we never actually filmed in there, but there could be rooms full of dead bodies.
Well, it could be post-rapture, but still pre-trip.
Hey, I have a pun for you.
The Walking Dead, W-O-K.
Walking Dead.
Okay.
Yeah.
Not bad.
All the veggies that were kind of meant for.
Did you pitch that?
You pitched that, I bet.
No, I never have.
That just came from the midst of our punishedness.
We did an attempt at like a Walking Dead episode.
What was that one?
I can't remember.
Okay.
It's a blanket on it.
On the Veggie Tales we did.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, the whole origin story of veggies is one that we've, you know, we actually have, Phil had written a Bob and Larry movie that kind of, you know, answered the question, you know, where do the vegetables come from?
But even, but even in the answering of where the modern vegetables came from, we never really answered the question ultimately where they came from.
They just had always been here through time immemorial.
So it is a bit of a mystery.
I know like with Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson always regretted like saying where Hobbes came from.
Because I think in the very first panel, it's Calvin catching the tiger.
And he always said later, like, he wished that he didn't do that.
Cause it's better when it's like kind of the mysterious.
They're just there.
You got to accept it.
The vegetables talk.
They don't have any hands, but they can pick things up.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it sort of ruins the mystique if you go too far with that.
Yeah, it could.
It could.
Did you ever see some of Doug's pitches for his idea that how to redesign Veggie Tales?
I don't hang it up and stuff.
I don't, you know, I might, if you put a few in front of me, I might see.
Doug can be very angular and very aggressive.
So I'm imagining what those would have looked like.
He had this one where it was like these Bob and Larry are in this chariot and they have arms and hands.
They have the weird hairdos from the little sprouts on their heads.
They have like buck teeth.
They just look completely different.
And this chariot is being pulled by these like giant mantis creatures.
Pure Doug Tenapel style.
So if people knew, like if Doug actually had gotten his way with that show, I think it would have been a great show.
It would not have been Veggie Tales, but it would have been an excellent show.
I do think that is probably the better way to digest that show.
Like if you're just a Christian parent, you're like, I would love it if there was a show with good values in it and, you know, that taught Bible verses.
And, you know, just for just detach yourself from Veggie Tales and just think, oh, this is some other show about vegetables.
It's nice to have another one out there.
Yeah, but those of us who grew up with Veggie Tales would have rioted.
The main thing is they didn't have eyebrows.
Or they did have eyebrows.
When Veggie Tales first started becoming really, really popular in the mid to late 90s, there was another Christian group that was doing a fruit of the spirit show, and they put that out.
And actually, the designs weren't really, they were actually pretty good.
And so we actually reached out to the guy who was doing the designs for the and hired him.
So his name was Brian Ballinger.
And so we said, hey, Brian, you want to come work for us instead?
He was like, sure.
Did you ever have any of that fallout?
Like anybody, any death threats or anything when Veggie Tales got eyebrows and stuff like that?
When they got eyebrows?
Oh, you mean from the new designs?
Yeah, the new designs, that was a huge issue.
Remember, like, I remember we.
Oh, the eyebrows were, the eyebrows were big.
I think, you know, one of the, I think the thing, you know, and this is, you know, maybe a more personal perception, although I have heard it from others.
The thing for me were the colored irises that were.
Oh, people really didn't like those.
Yeah.
Because I think more than anything else, you know, we relied so heavily on, you know, the Veggie's eyes to emote, you know, so people are really locked in on those big eyes.
And, you know, when the, when they got colored eyes, it just, it just made them more different probably than any other part of their design.
So that's true.
Yeah.
So, but again, you know, they look beautiful, but they just weren't, they just weren't themselves.
I remember Phil saying in an interview, because if you watch the really old Veggie Tales, like if the character's eyes get bigger, their pupils get bigger with it.
Right.
Yeah, because those were all, yeah, all of that geometry was locked together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the deformation lattice.
Yeah.
I remember Phil saying in an interview or maybe on his podcast or something that you guys didn't actually even really know how to make eyebrows work with the, you know, could have them floating out there at the time.
Because eyebrows are nice to have for emotions, like to make your character have emotions, eyebrows really help.
Absolutely.
So to try to have your character show emotion with no eyebrows, like you see a human with their eyebrows shaved off, they're horrifying.
So they can't answer.
They have no emotions.
They have one facial expression.
Are you with your blonde eyebrows?
Yeah, my eyebrows and eyebrows.
Yeah.
Sort of disappear into your head.
Oh, man.
Well, actually, yeah.
So what we did with the characters back in the day and continue to do, this is the style that we've incorporated is we emote with the tops of their eyes.
And so whatever a shape an eyebrow would normally take for emotion, we do that with the line of the top of their eye.
So if they're angry, both of their eye tops are kind of pointed in, looking like that.
If they're surprised, they're up and rounded.
So we're able to kind of get that just from the shape of their upper eye.
But when you do have, you're right, when you have eyebrows to assist that, it's very, very helpful.
And with Mr. Lunt, who didn't have eyes, we would do that.
We would use the wrinkles in his forehead to emote for certain scenes.
But yeah, just learning, you know, getting all those tricks down was, you know, it was just challenging with the limitations of the characters initially, how to, you know, how to fully emote them.
Has there been any has there been any fallout with Mr. Lunt, like, you know, culture appropriation or like Phil doing an accent?
Yeah, I think we're not supposed to do, like, white people aren't supposed to do accents of other cultures now.
Like, it's not allowed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, tell that to Mel Blank too when you go back to the middle.
I know, the master.
Yeah.
No, but it's true.
You know, it definitely is something that's a little trickier.
And really, Phil and I, you know, we met doing puppeting, you know, so we were both puppeteers and we.
How do you meet?
How do you meet doing that?
Down underneath the thing.
It's like, hey, you've got a puppet on your arm, too.
I just imagine wherever you were, there was a lot of weirdos around.
It was called Bible College.
Okay, yeah.
Yep.
So, yep, that's correct.
Yeah, no.
So we met.
Well, we had grown up in different parts of the country.
He was from the Chicago area.
I was from the Denver area.
And we were both kind of just huge Jim Henson fans.
Kind of, we didn't know each other in high school, but I got involved in puppeting.
And then when we went to this small Bible college up in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, they had a puppet ministry, which like for both of us was like, wow, that's something you can do, you know?
And so we both.
You think that puppets couldn't accept Christ because they're not really, they don't have souls.
That's weird.
That's right.
That's right.
But they, I don't know.
I was going to make a false point.
I was going to make a salt point, but I couldn't come up with one.
That's how they felt.
But, yeah, so we met, you know, doing puppets.
And so we would, a lot of the voices actually that ended up being veggie voices were voices that we used for our puppets.
And you only have so many number of voices until you kind of have to start doing accents to add on to your voice, your voice list.
And so since we did so many voices, that just became kind of the go-to.
It's like, oh, okay, well, now I'll be a French pee because if I just do my regular voice squeaky, people that'll give it away is me saying, hey, that's the same dude that does Larry's voice.
So that was a big reason.
And, you know, this was in the early 90s, but as the time, as time went on, Mr. Lunt and then Mr. Nezzer, who was, that was Phil's impression of the, what was it, was it Nightmare on Elm Street?
Not Elm Street, Nightmare Before Christmas.
It was one of those, it was one of those stop motion films.
It was like the Oogie Boogie Man or something like that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, Phil's sort of impersonation there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So that was sort of the origin of all those.
But it's so funny because my wife, who is Hispanic, she's from Columbia.
Mr. Lunt is her favorite character.
So it's like, you know.
That's why I married a Hispanic woman also.
Mr. Lunt, just for the accents.
You wanted a female version of Mr. Lunt in your life.
But when Phil actually started the Mr. Lunt voice, it was sort of a mix between Guido Sarducci.
You remember that the, he was an SNL Saturday Night Live character.
So it was sort of a mix between Italian and is that a Christian show?
Saturday Night Live?
No, but the one that comes on right after Saturday Night Live is.
Sorry.
But anyways, yeah, so Phil, yeah, that's kind of where that voice originated with Phil.
Yeah, I remember that was another thing on the limitations of our show is we had a very limited staff of voices.
We just had you and Phil, and then we had Rob Paulson and Tress McNeil, who are both amazing veteran voice actors.
But really, it was the four of you who had to fill every role in the entire show.
And so Tress basically had to have a different voice for every female.
Like every once in a while, we'd have one of you guys go like, talk like a woman.
Exactly.
What was the one?
What was the one voice that I did?
It was sort of a high-pitched southern voice.
I forget what character that was for, but it was more creepy than anything else.
Yeah.
But yeah, no, yeah, each one of us had to just do a ton of different voices.
You're right.
There was only four, and that all had to do with budget.
Yep.
So we're going to get into our subscriber portion.
I would love to ask you how you felt about Bacon Bill, other additions to the show.
We'd love to talk to you about some of the stuff that Phil has said about some of his regrets about Veggie Tales and what else.
Funny stories from your life.
And whatever.
So let people know who are listening right now where they can find your stuff and you and if they want to read Dead Sea Squirrels or any of the sequels that we listed here.
Sure, absolutely.
Well, so you can find me on Instagram at mike.naraki.
And then I also have a MikeNaraki authors page on Facebook.
So you can look me up there.
I have a mikenaraki.com website, which has been in construction for years now.
So one of these days I got to fill that up.
But probably Instagram and Facebook are the best way to reach out.
Cool.
All right, Mike, we're going to close the curtain and head off into the subscriber lounge.
Goodbye, everybody.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I got to say, I'm a fan of Bacon Bill.
I like him.
I know.
He was a great character.
So we've got a few Bible verses that I don't think Larry the Cucumber's ever read.
Would you mind trying to read them?
Oh, man.
I remember being a little emotional on that one because it was like, yeah, goodbye, everybody.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it did.
It did.
And I felt the same way actually recording it.
You know, Bob and Larry are like your, your, you know, your friends, your teachers, but they're pointing kids to God.
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