The Brothers Carrotmazov

For some reason I was thinking of Veggie Tales. For those of you who aren't Christian, Veggie Tales is basically one of those cartoons made for Christians to help express the intricacies of the faith to the little kiddies in ways that are more interesting then reading the Bible, which can be something of a boring read, or even worse reading Aquinas or some. Instead, you get little funny cartoons about vegitables that very from Biblical Retellings, to retellings of the classics with a Christian message.

I was thinking about how they'd redo classics like this. The ones that came to mind are "The Grapes of Wrath,"(done with actual grapes), and "Madame Bovarry,"(renamed Madame Blueberry). These are both books I have yet to read, but I figure I am going to get around to them at somepoint. Still, stuff like Madame Blueberry is different from Madame Bovary. Instead of the Madame Bovary character having a series of affairs, she goes on a shopping spree. This is because the show is supposed to be for kids. It also occured to me, why aren't they doing works by Christian writers? I mean, Flaubert and Steinbeck are Christians, at least I'm pretty sure they are, but why aren't they doing classics by writers who were open about their faith, say Dostoyevsky.

Which brings me to the brunt of todays post, what if Veggie Tales did an episode based on a Dostoyevsky novel.

Now, this can get pretty dark, because the two novels by Dostoyevsky I have read are Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Crime and Punishment is about a guy who kills a pawn broker in cold blood, and the rest of the novel is basically him being sick, guilty and the reader and him trying to put all this in persepctive. And plot of the Brothers Karamazov is basically driven by sex, lies and murder. Despite this, both novels have what I see as fundamentally a Christian meaning, and both speak much of redemption. Would the folks down at Big Ideas, the guys who make Veggie Tales, be open to a retelling of a Dostoyevsky novel and if so, how would they do it.

The one I'm thinking is The Brothers Karamazov, if only because it is the hardest to actually put into terms of a children's show since the major event of the novel revolves around patricide (alleged patricide in some cases but still). As in Madame Blueberry, they would have to find something that won't shoke the kids and more importantly the parents. What this could possibly be. Which also reminds me that what lead up to the patricide was the fact that the father was trying to seduce a woman that one of the brothers was interested in and who he had left for his wife. This would also be hard to work in. Actually, Dostoyevsky is probubly not a good example for this because of all that is going on in the book. Fyodor's writing is just to complex to make into a Veggie Tales episode.

But the point is, I have this image of the cast of Veggie Tales as characters in a darker and edgier episode based on Dostoyevsky. It's not exactly a bad thing either, since it is still in the same basic format but we're doing the kind of things that I'm experiencing now as a Christian. The nature of faith, the seeming cruelty of the universe. Why is it that they only make Christian cartoons for kids and when they do it can be so optomistic? Maybe I should develop something like Veggie Tales for people my age who are more open to the idea of questioning the nature of there faith. I'll have to make a follow up to this at somepoint.