A Brief History of VeggieTales Musical Covers
A Brief History of VeggieTales Musical Covers
A deep dive into the VeggieTales 30th anniversary album and the bizarre vegetable themed covers of years past
If you grew up around Christian North American culture in the mid-2000s, you’ve probably heard of VeggieTales. Their main product was their animated television show which centred around retelling bible stories in a pithy and inoffensive half hour format. Each of the biblical characters (except Jesus) are replaced by one of their rotating cast of animated vegetables. Bob the tomato and Larry the cucumber were the perennial favourites / standing hosts, but there were a variety of characters stretching across the vegetable kingdom. Their denominationally ambiguous biblical storytelling, easy to find morals (usually directly stated at the beginning and end of every episodes), and then cutting edge 3D animation quickly entered them into the halls of Christian content fame. Not to mention the fact that most of the episodes actually still hold up all these years later.
VeggieTales reached an inarguable peak in the early to mid 2000s and stayed relatively popular until bankruptcy problems forced the veggies to hang up their (animated) video cameras for good. During their heyday they sold everything from books, to clothing, and even to video games. I don’t know if they ever sold VeggieTales branded food, but I’m sure someone pitched it at some point.
Even though the series’ main success can be attributed to their television episodes, what has stuck with people the most are the songs within them. Most of the bible stories included musical numbers, often parodying genres or pop culture moments. Each episode also included a section in the middle called “Silly Songs with Larry” which Archibald the asparagus helpfully explained was “the part of the show where Larry comes out and sings a silly song.”
It was the show’s thirtieth anniversary last year and VeggieTales released a commemorative musical album, called VeggieTales 30th Anniversary Celebration, with little fanfare, but great quality. It featured hits from the show’s past like “Oh Where is my Hairbrush,” “We Are The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything,” and “Barbara Manatee”. It reaffirmed to me that both the songs that appear in the silly songs section and those that appeared in the regular portion of show are of surprisingly fantastic quality for kids’ television programming. The songs are cunning parodies of both form and genre, ranging from Italian opera to bluegrass, but always including a set of veggies doing something hilarious.
Hearing these songs again is like pulling out a time capsule. There was a distinct familiarity that appeared as I start to remember the words to “Everybody Has A Water Buffalo,” and began to hum the bizarrely catchy “Oh No, What We Gonna Do?” around the house.
Interspersed among the VeggieTales original songs are some odd covers. There’s a few Christian rock songs like Audio Adrenaline’s “Big House” and Switchfoot’s “Meant to Live,” but there’s also some secular hits like Rascal Flats’ “Life is a Highway” and Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel.”
It seems an odd companion to a VeggieTales album, but not unduly surprising when looking at the show’s traditionally parodistic nature when it comes to pop culture. Yet it’s both unquestionably bizarre and unequivocally fun how well the tracks are made. While I certainly enjoyed them, I also wondered why these tracks were made. Did they make them just for this album? Why would they make them at all? Why did they pick “Life is a Highway”?
As befits my now honed news sense after last week’s novelty slipper investigation, I turned to the internet.
I did a little bit of sleuthing online and ended up on the impressively comprehensive, but shockingly sparse VeggieTales community wiki. To my surprise, I discovered that none of the songs on the 30th anniversary album are new, they are all taken from previous albums. It shouldn’t be that shocking, given that most anniversary albums are similar, but that raises another question: when did they record country music covers?
Here's the story as far as I can piece together: starting in the early 2000s, VeggieTales released a string of albums that had little to do with their previous original music albums, instead covering popular public domain hits across genres. For instance, if you want to hear the Veggies sing a classic work song, look no further than the “Ive been working on the railway / Down by the Station” Medley, from On the Road with Bob and Larry (2003). Also featured on that album is Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” so take from that what you will.
There’s some speculation that these albums were a way to make a quick buck as cash flow dwindled, but I never found a hard source for these facts. It seems like a likely enough scenario, but maybe they just really like public domain songs.
Unfortunately, most of the albums are hard to find online and perpetually grayed out on Spotify – either meaning that the songs are unavailable for streaming in Canada or simply unavailable at all. Where possible I’ve included links to some albums that are available on Internet Archive, probably due to their inclusion of public domain songs, but some of these definitely violate copyright law, so your mileage may vary. Of course I could pay for them, but spending $50 on a set of VeggieTales music albums seems like work I could avoid by saying I can’t find them.
Most of the albums aren’t really that notable and have generic track lists with standard classics like “The Wheels On the Bus” and “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Though interestingly enough, when the saints appears on an album called O Veggie Where Art Thou (2003); it’s an album filled with public domain hymns and Christian songs, but is also presumably named after the Coen Brothers film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
I had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing that movie when I mistook it for Hail, Caesar!, the film I actually wanted to watch. To put it shortly, it's not a family friendly Christian film. It’s an interesting choice for sure.
The quality of any of these public domain songs isn’t exceptional insofar as it’s hard to make public domain songs sound any good. They all sound fine and the veggie voice acting remains reliably great, but there’s nothing outstanding in the handful of albums they made with public domain tracks.
After a few years of this, the Veggies eventually pivot to covering popular songs and released an album called Christian Hit Music (2007), which covered Christian artists like Switchfoot, Michael W. Smith, and Amy Grant.
In another weird turn of events, there was also a mashup album called Veggie Rocks (2004) where Christian artists covered VeggieTales songs. This album seems to be lost to the internet, but someone on Spotify made an approximate re-creation using tracks available from the few VeggieTales films.
In 2006 Bob and Larry Sing the 70s hit the charts, followed by Bob and Larry Sing the 80s in 2010. Sadly both of these are a little harder to find and I was unable to experience the power of “Gourds Just Wanna Have Fun,” but it sounds remarkably entertaining. The more or less final follow-up to those cover albums is Bob and Larry Go Country (2012), where we finally see the tracks included on the thirtieth anniversary album – sadly, the country album is another album mostly lost to the sands of internet time / paywalls.
VeggieTales is mostly defunct now due to financial issues and various business politics, but if there’s one thing they mastered, it was the art of the parody. Across their films, shows and albums, they managed to expertly parody almost everything under the sun.
There was even a VeggieTales video game released in 2002 called VeggieTales: The Mystery of Veggie Island, parodying the 1990 game The Secret of Monkey Island. Monkey Island was a genre defining game, so it’s not inconceivable that someone knew about it, but who thinks of this? Who at Big Idea (the company that produces/produced VeggieTales) thought that they needed to parody Monkey Island to make a video game?
It’s that level of comedic commitment that heightens everything VeggieTales. It was and always has been something for kids that adults can enjoy too, simply because they put the effort in to make it good.
The reach of VeggieTales is unique in both the Christian and secular worlds. They dominated the Christian media industry and were allowed to extend an exhaustive cultural reach. As I continued researching, I found no end to VeggieTales. There was a live show that did a U.S. national tour and even a planned, but never produced hybrid live action-animated film that would take place in the real world and reveal the origin stories of Bob and Larry.
Anyways, if you are a fan or a former fan of VeggieTales, give the 30th Anniversary album a listen, it’s a great deal of fun. I love how bizarre and unique VeggieTales got in their later days. Did Bob and Larry really need to cover country songs? Absolutely not, but is the world not just a little better for it?
We’re spoiled for parodies these days with all sorts of AI creations that make their rounds on the internet. This return to the real thing (well, the real fake thing, I suppose) is a great reminder that sometimes a computer just can’t catch up to a human. It’s not the computers that think the characters from VeggieTales should sing “Jesus Take the Wheel,” it’s the humans. There’s something beautiful about that in a bizarre and veggie filled way.
News! News! News!
Weirder than VeggieTales country covers? Unlikely.
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