Veggie Tales: The Toy that Saved Christmas!

Especially in modern day, many of you wonder about your fellow man and say “they just don’t understand what Christmas is about.” When the commercialism of the world counts the number of shopping days before Christmas, the point is driven home. In “The Toy that Saved Christmas,” Big Idea Productions addresses your concern without compromise. In fact, the video portrays an entire town (Dinkletown) that “didn’t get Christmas, they didn’t understand it.”

In this video, we meet Mr. Wolly P. Nezzer (the brother to Mr. Nezzer of chocolate bunny factory fame in “Rack, Shack and Benny”). Mr. Nezzer owns a toy factory and he is mass-producing Buzz-Saw Louies for the upcoming Christmas season. A Buzz-Saw Louie is a toy that can talk by pressing his nose and he even has a saw built into his arm!

Mr. Nezzer’s marketing tactics are, unfortunately, very believable. He has his own Television Broadcasting Station that blasts messages to children of how badly you need THIS Buzz-Saw Louie toy. In fact, the Buzz-Saw Louie is programmed to say things like: “Christmas is when you get stuff,” “You need more toys,” and “Billy has more toys than you.” All of this accomplishes Mr. Nezzer’s plan… having all the kids whining to their parents that they want a Buzz-Saw Louie!!

Thankfully, a miracle occured and one particular Buzz-Saw Louie toy didn’t like what was coming out of his head and decided to do something about it! With the help of Junior Asparagus, Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber, there is a happy ending. Along the way there are some fun action as the heros seem to get into several tight spots. In the end, a better message that Christmas is about giving, love, and the story of the baby Jesus ring clearly.

The intermission for the video was a “Silly Song with Larry” that had Larry waiting for Santa Claus with three cookies. Larry gets some unusual visitors and winds up with no cookies (he has the I.R.S. to thank for that!). Don’t worry, Santa Claus is really Bob the Tomato dressed up!

For “The Toy that Saved Christmas,” I did see a couple of places within the video where an opportunity for mentioning God was missed. One example is the Veggie crew avoided a disaster and they stated “we are sure lucky we didn’t go down there.” This could’ve been “God was watching out for us to keep us from going down there.”

In summary, “Veggie Tales” are great. This one in particular may help with teaching folks about Christmas. Another suggestion that our family is attempting is to celebrate Christ on Christmas, gift-giving will be done on new year’s eve or day. All in all, you will be hard pressed to find any comparable computer animation videos of this quality in the secular offerings.