Bob and Larry Don't Get Any Sillier than This

It took me awhile to pick up The Wonderful World of Auto-Tainment, an off-the-wall VeggieTales offering that showed up on the shelves last year, but I finally got my hands on it yesterday. It’s a video so out of the ordinary it rather defies categorization. It falls somewhat in line with the Silly Sing-along videos, but there are no words at the bottom of the screen and the songs are not derived from earlier videos. In fact, most of them are not original creations at all, but traditional campfire and church songs, with some opera (provided by a cute but very random aardvark) and Gilbert and Sullivan thrown in for good measure.

The video begins with Larry refusing to participate in the traditional performance of the VeggieTales theme song. He explains to Bob that theme songs have no place in the future of entertainment because they are predictable. In the future, all entertainment will be randomly generated. Bob and Larry find themselves in a white room where two robots are about to begin hosting a show. (This no-frills background is indicative of things to come, as most of the video features elements done in two dimensions in a very simple animation style, an ironic attribute for a video about the future.) Larry observes with excitement as the robots crack jokes in which the set-up and punchline don’t match up. “You weren’t expecting that, were you, Bob? That’s what makes it funny!” Bob’s confusion continues to grow as the auto-tainment theme song plays amidst kaleidoscopic images of the Veggie characters, but the robots forge ahead, randomly selecting characters to sing songs featuring random topics.

The most entertaining of these musical numbers were, for me, the first and third. The first song, provided by the French peas, was a recitation of the campfire favorite There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, a song which builds upon itself until the final rundown: “There’s a flea on the wing of the fly on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.” The tune is accompanied by a slide presentation that starts out sedately but grows more and more chaotic, featuring pictures bearing little or no resemblance to the object being mentioned. Keep your eyes glued to the screen for this one. My other favorite was Archibald Asparagus’ breathless rendition of Modern Major General. Having recently seen Pirates of Penzance at my former high school, I found this number particularly entertaining, and Archibald possessed precisely the right demeanor to pull the song off with perfect comedic flair.

Also included in the video is a short film similar to those played prior to the showing of Pixar movies like A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo. Entitled Lunch, the short begins with a quote from Paul about the woes that arise from being greedy. Like most of those Pixar featurettes, this one is silent, but the characters do a fine job of conveying emotions without words. The characters in question are a strange bird-like creature and his dog. As they sit down to enjoy their lunch on a park bench, the bird notices a billboard advertising meat-flavored candy bars. Suddenly his sandwich looks woefully inadequate, so it is with joy that he discovers a vending machine nearby. What follows is a series of hilarious mishaps that culminate in a moment of bitter – and somewhat distasteful – irony. A very entertaining interlude.

As the entertainment wears on, the smaller of the two robots shows signs of fatigue, or cross-circuiting. He is acting extremely bizarre, and his more level-headed co-host is at a loss to make sense of his irrational actions. Bob, meanwhile, grows more and more frustrated as the show proceeds, until he can hide his disdain no longer. He takes his role as host very seriously, and he’s always been uneasy with anyone else trying to do the job for him. Just when he’s about ready to hijack the show from the robots, Larry enlists Junior Asparagus with the task of bringing meaning into this muddle with a sentimental song about how God loves us even when things go wrong.

Despite this last-minute message, this is hardly a didactic video. Instead, it is an opportunity for the VeggieTales gang to stuff as much silliness as they can into a video while honoring some of their favorite childhood songs. It also hints that technology can be a great asset to humanity but should never replace it entirely, but mostly it just provides a silly vision of the future that allows us to appreciate the present all the more.