Heh. The one VeggieTale that I have seen is the 2002 feature film based on Jonah, and I thought it wasn’t bad. It has a reasonably respectable 6.5 rating on IMDB and 66% / 74% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That sounds ugly, but is most likely true.
Children’s Christian media is cheesy because sloths are slow. (And sloths are slow because otherwise they wouldn’t be called sloths, obviously!)
It’s pretty much a feature of all Christian media nowadays. They want to attract and entertain recruits, so they try to imitate popular secular art. That means stripping out everything edgy and making it about god, which is a pretty good way to ruin just about anything.
Maybe Google removes repeated terms in its input (while setting some flag to say the repeated terms is more important).
On the topic, is it only American Christian entertainment media that is this insipid, or are non-American Christian movies this bad as well?
An media created to meet a specific market demand is often going to be lacking in areas not directly related to that demand. Look at almost any genre, and it’s the same. Martial arts films frequently have ridiculous plots and shallow characterization, because the market for martial arts films puts a premium on good action scenes. Same with superhero movies, or Hallmark romances, or space opera. Fans of the genre have specific expectations that they want met, and don’t care about the other stuff so long as it delivers on that expectation.
Sometimes you’ll get a film that fires on all cylinders, and not only meets genre expectations, but also works as a straight drama - stuff like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for martial arts films, 2001 for sci-fi, or The Ten Commandments for religious films. But for fans of the genre, that’s gravy - martial arts fans don’t care if Master of the Flying Guillotine has complex, realistic characters, so long as the stunts and fights scenes are good. Christian movies fans don’t care if Bibleman’s plot are ridiculous, so long as the Christian message is presented well.
Obligatory Simpsons link (sorry, very bad quality):
I can only speak for Germany, but here explicitly Christian entertaining media is virtually non-existent (I don’t know any).
I’m sorry, but are you suggesting that the Ten Commandments, the story of how the Jewish people received the Torah and became a people, is a Christian movie?
Christians tend to think so, yes.
Well, then this is a great opportunity to correct that misconception.
Well, Christians accept the OT as part of their canon, so yes.
And it was very popular with Christians.
Sure it’s popular, but it doesn’t make it a Christian movie. It maybe the Christian OT, but it’s our Torah. It’s simply a bad example.
The one starring Charlton Heston? Yeah, pretty much. Cecil B. DeMille, although half-Jewish by birth, was a devout Christian who saw his films as a way of promoting Christian values. And it certainly didn’t become one of the most successful movies in history because of the mid-20th century American public’s vast interest in, and support for, Jewish culture. It’s a Christian movie because Christians appropriated Jewish beliefs and declared that they were really Christian beliefs, and the movie is an extension of that practice.
No, as Miller explained, it was Cecil B. DeMille who made it a Christian movie:
For Christians, the Old Testament basically supersedes the Torah. Their viewpoint is that the events and doctrine of the New Testament supply a deeper meaning to the pre-Christian Scripture than non-Christians are able to understand. This is a very old attitude that you see in exaggerated form in, for example, medieval Christian mystery plays, where OT characters such as Abraham or Joseph invoke the “holy Trinity” or the “blessed Virgin”. It’s not possible, from a medieval Christian perspective, that these holy figures of the OT didn’t share their understanding of divinity.
From a Christian standpoint, the true way to interpret the Old Testament is as a prefiguration of Christianity. Jews can claim that it’s really “theirs”, but what they’re claiming is merely a distant faint echo of its real significance (according to Christian theology).
As somebody with cultural and family ties to both Judaism and Christianity, I’ve often noticed that one of their chief points of miscommunication is that Christians don’t realize that Jews don’t see the Jewish Torah as fundamentally incomplete without the New Testament, and Jews don’t realize that Christians do see it that way.
There’s an episode of King of the Hill where, to Hank’s dismay, his son Bobby gets involved with a Christian rock band and Hank sums it all up perfectly.
“Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock ‘n’ roll worse.”
It’s like the concept of “original sin”. To Jews, the story of Adam and Eve is an open and shut case - God told them not to eat some fruit, they did, God kicked them out of Eden, the end. It answers a whole bunch of important questions like why the world sucks, or why we wear clothing, or why snakes have don’t legs, but that’s basically it. For Christians, it’s the basis of a whole philosophy. Jews just don’t get that.
I won’t belabor this point, as it is a hijack, but I fully understand that, having lived with Jewish beliefs appropriated- not just built on but taken over- but that’s a conversation for a different thread.
However, I disagree that the cultural context turns it into a Christian movie per se, of the type we’re talking about here. I’ve seen Exodus movies that play heavily in the Christian belief that the Torah presages Christ (lamb of G-D etc), but this movie does not adopt those Christian tropes. I was raised on watching it every Passover (when it was still shown on TV specifically at Passover, and not Easter), as were most of the Jewish families I knew. It was not a movie made for and aimed to a Christian audience. It is not teaching Christian parables and values, which differe from Jewish ones.
Its a bit insensitive to labeling it a “Christian movie”, as opposed to even calling it a movie “Christian’s like”, given the topic and how it’s filmed. And now that it’s pointed out, I’m hopeful awareness makes folkx a bit more sensitive. It’s what anyone from any marginalized group hopes for when pointing out inadvertent hurt.
Anyway, hijack over.