Smiling Pirates

Three out of four kinder wanted to see The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything today; the fourth, Our Andrew, didn't object in theory but in practice wanted to go gaming at Games Workshop, the place for gamers to go gaming with gamers dontchaknow. Gamers have their own conventions; we don't host them; out of touch with the real world as per usual and no surprise there, I reckon. So we identified a malloplex within a crow's flight of the neighborhood Workshop, which is not in the neighborhood at all but Our Andrew hopes and hopes that the vagaries of the real estate market (too much vacant new storefrontage too empty too long and too close to his Homely Home) will align themselves appropriately and evolve a Games Workshop a mile or so from the Homely Home. This would put it conveniently within biking distance, but biking I fear is for dweebs and Our Andrew is not now nor has he ever been a Dweeb. We are pedalling madly below water to ensure that he will never be a Droog either, but as always we digress.

Well, if one is looking for the latest and greatest advances in CGI, the Veggie Tales franchise has never been the place to look first and still isn't. In our circles the Veggies appear about the same time as Winnie the Pooh and Thomas the Tank Engine videos, but have on the whole better legs. I'm not sure that this is due to the quality of the writing, or the parents' desire to hold onto the children, or even of the hearts of the creative types and the created's recipients. In fact, the corporate history is all too familiar and sad: head honcho grows bidniss too big too fast, signs One Dumb Contract, it all collapses in a heap of lawsuits and bitterness, franchise gets ed up at firesale prices by disinterested acquisitor, head honcho ends days sadder but wiser.

But.

This being America, there are second acts. And while I was om-ing through the movie, doing my best not to worry about my own problems (mostly having to do with solving the delta between net pay and current bills), it occurred to me that the saga of Phil Vischer, the aforementioned Head Veggie, is not dissimilar to the sage of Brian Wilson, the sounder of our own innocence.

If I'm recalling aright, Phil Vischer had the thought of "Saturday morning cartoons with Sunday morning values", and having the talent around him to craft moral tales with Warner Bros. 'tude, using off-the-shelf video graphics software and a distribution network that put the things in our faces through endcap displays in Our Nation's (Capital's) supermarkets and emporia, the franchise was pretty ubitquitous through the mid-90s. Seems to me the Warner Bros. 'tude was a key part of the package: there's a certain snarkiness in the omniscient tone that is consistent throughout most of the individual pieces of the package (staging, graphics, music, words) -- but not the voices. As far as I know, none of the voice actors were or are trained actors, and so I think there's more of the performers' personas in their roles than there are in, oh say Spongebob (the closest video equivalent I can think of). It was Mr. Vischer and his friends voicing; they performed but did not act, and so they did not or could not really professionally dissociate their selves from their characters. My opinion and $1.75 is that this is what kids responded to; I base this on close observation of my own kids, including Our Andrew the Anti-Dweeb, as well as on observations of 10,000 kids watching the Veggies as warm-up videos before the quadriennal evangelical Christian kid missions to the streets of Our Aforementioned Nation's Capital (the biggest response to all of the warm-ups is to the Veggies) as well as the presence of Veggie tapes in the video libraries of all of the churches we pass through. Mr. Vischer became convinced that he needed to be the Christian Disney, and pushed his company into deals much like the Disney Disney pushed his company into deals sixty or seventy years previously; the difference being that perhaps Disney Disney's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in pre-World War I smalltown America) and Mr. Vischer's backers and bankers were products of their times (growing up in 60s and 70s America). And where both Disney Disney and Mr. Vischer trapped themselves into a cycle of borrowing money to float the business so that they could develop product to pay the last round of loans, falling into cycles of diminishing returns and exponentially increasing loans, Disney Disney gambled and won big with Snow White and Mr. Vischer gambled and lost the farm with Jonah, the first Veggie Tales movie. Of course, in the late '30s Our Nation didn't have the weekend box office grosses at our fingertips Sunday evening, and our popular art was not generally evaluated based on the opening weekend's box office. So the Disney company survived with its One Big Hit, morphing into ... well, a company that continues to look fearfully for Disney Reincarnate every ten years or so, now having declared that lo John Lasseter is He for the nonce; and the Vischer company didn't, got bought and bought and bought again, with Mr. Vischer left behinder and behinder, as it was he who was the Boss who, well, ran the company into the ground so to speak.

Which doesn't on the surface of it seem to have anything to do with Brian Wilson, who by his own admission frittered his music and his life away for 20 years or more in a kind of passive agressive hoovering of everything that wasn't illegal, immoral, fattening or nailed down on the Left Coast. I'm guessing that there were far more people around Mr. Wilson enabling his bad behavior than there were around Mr. Vischer; and as far as personal toxicity goes, I'm guessing that Mr. Wilson's toxic behavior was far more destructive to his personal self and immediate family -- hard really to see any toxicity other than well-intentioned hubris at work in Vischer, although I suspect that when Vischer's company collapsed far more people lost their jobs than when Mr. Wilson slid into his personal oblivion. Mr. Wilson's self-destruction is part of My Foolish Generation's legend, and is I think known well enough to not be improved by my retelling. What is so wonderfully surprising was his willingness to finally get off his butt and own the art again.

I have a couple of posts boiling up inside of me about Good Work and Just Doing the Damn Good Work. They're not ready yet. Mr. Wilson let go of his hubris and finished Smile; Mr. Vischer let go of his hubris and finished Pirates. Both works are naive; that's OK. Both works are from the creators' hearts; that's OK. Both works are major works from people who are supposed to have been Written Off. My mind wishes for more meat on the bones of these works; my heart's OK with them. The Little Boys are quite happy with the latter, and aren't ready for the former; the Little Boys are still hopping around the living room reworking scenes from the movie and incorporating themselves into the scenes. That's successful work.

I'm glad to live in a time and a place where Phil Vischer and Brian Wilson can rise and fall and rise aright again.