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STUDIO: Big Idea
MSRP: $14.98
RATED: G
RUNNING TIME: 52 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• “Making of” Featurette
• Wynonna Music Video
• Wynonna Interview
• Behind the Scenes
• Veggie Commentary
• Trivia Game
• Sing Along
• DVD Game
• Family Activity
• Cookie Recipe
• How-to-Draw
• DVD-ROM Fun
The Pitch
“An animated Lord of the Rings with all the characters played by religious talking plants? Ent-ilicious!“
The Humans
None
The Nutshell
Frodo’s mission to destroy the Ring of Power is here transposed to “Toto”’s quest to learn how best to use a mystical bean-of-plenty. Duh — plant it!
"Do you accept Christ as your savior NOW, infidel legume?"
The Package
1.33:1 standard interlaced video. Easily navigable menus. Lots of mini-docs, interviews (Wynonna Judd may not be famous round these parts anymore, but she’s still… big), and a rather well-designed set-top game. Also, a bizarre Family Activity and a decent recipe for stained-glass cookies.
The Lowdown
This is my first direct exposure to the Bible Belt juggernaut known as Veggie Tales: “Sunday morning values, Saturday morning fun!” Yikes.
I must admit I don’t get the thematic significance of Christian produce. Why anthropomorphized edibles? Surely their lack of arms and legs must make them cheaper to animate, but is that it?
"Consider the lilies, how they SUCK!"
Then there’s those Big Ideas themselves. If there’s one thing I hate more than someone cramming ideology down my throat, it’s someone slipping it into my food. I gather that this is one of the less overtly evangelical projects in the franchise, but the agenda is still easy to detect. As is a certain passive strain of anti-Semitism: Turning Gimli the Dwarf into a lazy, greedy, cowardly complainer who says “Oy!” all the time? Re-naming the Smeagol character… “Spiegel”? Jiminy crickets.
I award one bonus point for the cookie recipe, and another for a pretty clever Elvis joke.