Warming Up

My daughter chose to watch the anthropomorphic cartoon VeggieTales on Netflix today. I wasn’t paying too much attention, but it looked like the kind of shit that we were attempting to take the piss out of with “The Organ Gang” and actually made me feel slightly upset that we never properly got that show off the ground. It had been mainly my baby. I remember sitting in a Burger King near Oxford Circus (long since changed to retail space) and writing down character and episode ideas on the back of old University posters, both because I liked the idea of recycling and also because I couldn’t really afford to buy paper at the time. I am sure I still have those somewhere. In one morning I had captured the essence of the idea. Just really a gruesome step too far for the whole idea of anthropomorphised gangs of similar items having adventures. But I thought it would actually work for real though. Kids would like it because it was a bit too sick, as would adults and also it could be fairly educational. 

We took the idea to the people at Spitting Image and it got some distance before falling by the wayside, though was cheaply resurrected for This Morning With Richard Not Judy (which I always envisioned as an adult Banana Splits), where it didn’t properly work. Stew didn’t ever really like the idea anyway as far as I recall and was particularly disappointed with the execution. The artist Joseph Champniss later animated one of the unbroadcast sketches and even with fairly basic computer animation it was much more effective. Really though we had wanted stop frame animation.

Had we succeeded in creating a successful and lucrative children’s TV franchise at that point then we might never have gone on to bother with all the other crap we did. But I knew in Burger King that what I was doing had potential and there’s a Sliding Doors version of this Universe (maybe where instead I wrote up the idea in Macdonalds) where we are the Organ Gang billionaires and I feel slightly resentful towards Stewart for piggy backing on to my amazing idea.

Instead I live in this one, where I resent him for piggy backing on to all my other ideas.

Anyway Veggietales is the exact half-arsed kind of thing we were parodying. I mean it’s not even any different from the Munch Bunch really. They can’t even be bothered to give the characters arms so whenever they “hold” something, it just hovers in front of them, like they can control objects with their mind.

To be fair, it might be OK. It didn’t pull me in and I didn’t concentrate on anything that was going on (which I sometimes do), but I was very surprised, given the seemingly knockabout story of vegetables having adventures that an episode seemed to end with one of the pieces of food saying, "Remember kids, God made you special and He loves you very much.” Surely I had imagined that. I mean it was weird to have religion suddenly come into it. I have long wondered if Jesus has ever visited the earth as a piece of asparagus to teach the other asparagus about how they must live if they want to get into asparagus Heaven, but I didn’t think I would be getting the answer to that on Netflix.

The next episode ended with the same clanking sign off. If you need a potato to tell you that you are special, then you are not special at all my friend. Or only to potatoes.

You don’t get this kind of shit on CBeebies, where the only way they try to indoctrinate you subliminally is by having Rebecca on the channel to make all dads and mums question whether marriage was a good idea, when they could instead have been dressing up with Rebecca.

Suddenly getting religion with my vegetables was unsettling. Also if God made everyone special then no one is special. It’s just maths. 

Still if the Organ Gang is ever made I will make sure every episode ends with Barry Bladder saying, “Remember kids, your life is meaningless and you will all burn in Hell. So worship our Lord Satan”.