Jesus on the cutting room floor

news item: NBC SLICES AND DICES VEGGIE TALES

in a nutshell, nbc has picked up veggie tales for its saturday morning cartoon block. i feel certain that phil vischer, veggie tales creator, saw a great opportunity to put some God-honoring, moral and decent fare on network television, and he jumped on it... maybe it looked like such a great opportunity that he moved a little too fast, and didnt dot all his i's and cross all his t's before signing on the dotted line. because veggie tales is a straight-to-dvd production, naturally some editing would have to be done for commercial-heavy network television viewing. apparently what ol' phil possibly failed to consider was what the peacock network would want to see left out of the final product. he says they originally told him only the bible verse at the end would have to go, but now everything "God" about veggie tales is history (on saturday mornings that is). so, some folks are moaning and groaning about how mean nbc is, and how double-minded they are, and how anti-God hollywood is.

and while all that's true, is anybody really surprised?? what did people expect? i know phil vischer and the rest of the crew over at big idea have more talent in the little finger of their non-mouse hand than i do in my entire body. but if i ever were to stumble upon a Godly idea so fantastic that any network or cable company would consider wanting it, i think i'd be danged sure that i had an iron-clad contract and full creative control.

as the article mentioned (well its more of an op-ed piece than an article), this is the same nbc that fought tooth and nail for the "right" to use the f-word on the golden globes. maybe that would lead one to believe that God would be pretty safe territory for kids on a saturday morning. me, i was more shocked that phil vischer was caught off guard than i was at how hard the nbc censors slammed their jack-booted foot down on his neck. heck, even don wildmon hasnt sent me an email and a petition to sign on this one, and he gets pretty worked up about stuff that should be pretty obvious to us all by now.

but this is all just a drop of water in the ocean, friends. we're still by far the freest country on earth (for more on this, read this excellent post from tj scott). nobody's kicked in the doors to our churches yet, and that day is still a long ways off (unless God gets as tired of us as He used to get with israel, and humbles us good when we least expect it).

i'm afraid that phil vischer has cast his pearls before swine on this one, and that's too bad. it really was a great opportunity, and maybe theres a few lessons for the rest of us in the Christian community to glean from this unfortunate turn of events. as Jesus told His disciples when He sent them out in matthew 10:16, "...be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves." here's praying that we all heed that instruction as we go out to shine our light in a dark and treacherous world.