VeggieTales is one of those things that I enjoyed more than most people expect themselves to before they watch it, like The LEGO Movie, Disney-Descendants, or even Ralph Breaks the Internet. I really appreciate the time and effort that Phil Vischer, Mike Nawrocki, Lisa Vischer, and other writers and directors of VeggieTales put into telling brilliant stories palatable for both Christian and non-Christian kids that teach them positive life lessons. When Phil Vischer made The VeggieTales Show in 2018, he regretted only teaching kids to behave Christianly in the original video series without teaching them more about Christianity, but I ironically think that the wide variety of entertainment in VeggieTales movies is why it has been so popular and long-running, with different people like Phil Vischer, Mike Nawrocki, Tim Hodge, Jim Fisher & Jim Stahl, Brian K. Roberts, Mark Steele, and Cory Edwards seeming to serve different terms for writing or directing 3-to-9 ideas of VeggieTales films aired over the course of several years. Some of them did a great job writing female-led storylines in recent years when most of the films before Esther's introduction (and re-introduction as Petunia) were all male protagonists, but I would like to see Lisa Vischer or Megan Murphy write VeggieTales tales for a change, so they could be the first female directors or writers of their kind.
I miss Esther, but I am glad that the character designers made a suitable replacement for her 4 years later. Petunia Rhubarb was a great new addition to the main cast, and Cydney Trent can be a friend close in age to Lisa Vischer as Mike Nawrocki is to Phil Vischer. What I said before about the variety of entertainment in VeggieTales refers to the fact that some of their movies are based on Bible stories with our veggies being renamed in them to match the characters they play, but other times, their films are a nice spoof on classic literature, TV shows or movies that the creators enjoy, and there are also some stories such as Are You My Neighbor, Madame Blueberry, Auto-tainment or the LarryBoy stories, in which the veggie characters are still themselves and not playing a character with another name. VeggieTales has graced us with affectionate parodies of Gilligan's Island, Star Trek: The Original Series, An Easter Carol, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Pirates of the Caribbean (maybe), It's a Wonderful Life, Pinocchio, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen + The Avengers, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Saturday Night Fever, and Beauty and the Beast, all while still teaching the traditional veggie life lesson that they always do. It was fun growing up with VeggieTales for 20 years from 1993 to 2014 (except I was actually born in 1998), and watching Big Idea's computer animation improve over the years like when you watch a Pixar movie, except that with VeggieTales, you get to see the look of the same characters change over time within the advanced animation instead of waiting many years to see them again in a sequel. Speaking of Pixar, I think it is a very nice coincidence that Big Idea's The Toy That Saved Christmas featured a living human-like toy one year after Pixar came out with Toy Story, their first full-length animated feature.
