When I returned to work in Waldenbooks last month, one of the first
things I noticed was a prominently displayed storybook based on the
latest VeggieTales offering, An Easter Carol. I’d never heard
about this video, but I knew I’d have to pick it up soon. So yesterday I
went out and purchased the latest addition to my VeggieTales library,
along with The Wonderful World of Auto-Tainment, which I somehow
never picked up when it was released last year. My VeggieTales
collecting has been somewhat lacking lately; I also failed to buy The Star of Christmas,
the precursor to this video, when it first came out, and have since
only been able to find it at Tops, inexplicably packaged with an AOL
free trial CD. I did, however, see it on PBS on Christmas Eve the year
it came out, so I had been introduced to the characters and setting
which were revisited in An Easter Carol.
Like its
companion Christmas special, this latest offering clocks in at about 45
minutes and features a cast of Victorian characters including Millward
Phelps (Larry the Cucumber) and Cavis Appythart (Bob the Tomato), Pastor
Gilbert and his wife and son Edmund (Dad, Mom, and Junior Asparagus),
and featured character, Mr. Ebenezer Nezzer. The first time Mr. Nezzer
showed up in a VeggieTales video, it was as the crazed boss of a
chocolate bunny-making factory. His role here is similar, but this time
it’s plastic eggs that he produces – though chocolate bunnies do figure
into his plan for Easterland, a grand attraction which will replace the
old church that has been a town fixture since before he was born.
Although Mr. Nezzer’s beloved grandmother tried to teach him about the
joy of Easter, he missed the point. Now it’s up to an angel named Hope
(voiced by Grammy award-winning singer Rebecca St. James) to enlighten
him.
The story is based on Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol,
with Nezzer occupying the role of Scrooge and little Edmund becoming
Tiny Tim. Nezzer is not quite so misanthropic as that other Ebenezer;
everything he does is out of a desire to carry out the wishes of his
dearly departed grandmother. Still, he is rather self-serving and
egotistical, and certainly not too bright. His grandmother informs him
of the error of his ways in a vision, leaping eerily out of her portrait
on the wall to chide him for his Caesar-like failure to listen to her
warnings. But she leaves the bulk of the instruction to Hope, a
sprightly, sarcastic entity whose frustration with the old miser knows
no bounds. She shows him an Easter service from his childhood, a recent
meeting with an oddball inventor (Pa Grape) regarding his grand Easter
ambitions (expressed through an entertaining ditty parodying The Music Man’s Rock Island),
the current day at the Gilbert household, and, after a song chronicling
the life of Jesus, a glimpse of the future without the hope of Easter.
Like Scrooge, he is left profoundly changed by the vision, and the rest
of the video involves his efforts to save the church from the
construction crews under his command and avert a disaster back at the
factory.
The VeggieTales gang has been venturing lately into
different formats, abandoning such standbys as the countertop lessons
and Silly Songs with Larry in favor of a more cinematic approach. While I
enjoy the efforts and the massive attention to detail found in the
costumes and settings, I think my favorite videos will always be the
ones that contain these elements. There’s plenty of music here, but most
of the songs are rather serious and the closest thing to a Silly Song,
Nezzer’s rhythmic banter with the inventor, seems pretty hard to sing
along with. I didn’t walk away from the video humming anything, as I
often do with VeggieTales. The overall tone was more serious than most,
and it was definitely more preachy than videos in this series generally
are. In addition, I confess I found the much-hyped Hope rather annoying;
her attitude seemed a bit caustic to me, and her accent struck me as
inconsistent at times. (Interestingly, although this takes place in
London, only about half of the characters have British voices; I guess
it’s too complicated to give an already invented voice an accent.)
Those
quibbles aside, this is nonetheless a solid production and a welcome
addition to the VeggieTales line. It’s about time they had an Easter
video, and the silly antics of Cavis and Millward provide plenty of
levity to balance the serious message. Although it isn’t necessary to
see The Star of Christmas prior to this, I would recommend it, as
that video provides an introduction to the characters and contains
events which are referred to in An Easter Carol. It’s a little late to stick this in an Easter basket this year, but the story is one to be appreciated all year long.
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