Soon after Vischer's departure, VeggieTales was cancelled.Īfter selling Big Idea, Phil Vischer took two years off to recuperate. After Big Idea was purchased by Classic Media in 2004, Vischer further worked on VeggieTales under contract as a writer until 2009 (and continued to provide the voice of Bob and others until 2017, when his contract ended). Although the verdict was later overturned on appeal, the damage was done and Big Idea filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in summer of 2003. A jury ultimately ruled against Big Idea in 2003, awarding HiT & Lyrick $11M. Vischer offered to settle with HiT for $500,000 but, HiT declined and the case went to trial after the judge denied Big Idea's motion for summary judgement. To make things worse, Big Idea's termination of their association with their long-time distributor Lyrick Studios (the company behind Barney & Friends and Wishbone), caused Lyrick's parent company, HiT Entertainment to file a lawsuit against the company for "breach-of-contract". Their series continued being a hit in the market, but Vischer's decision to take out a loan and produce their first full-length film, Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, caused the company to slowly fall apart financially. īy 1999, Vischer slowly found himself running a company that was losing money due to a variety of circumstances. The series was an enormous hit and, by the late-1990s, had earned the company millions of dollars every year. In 1995, the series' third video, "Are You My Neighbor?", was released and VeggieTales continued releasing at least one video per year and even released their own newsletter called "What's the Big Idea?". Big Idea's next video was "God Wants Me To Forgive Them?!?" which was released in 1994 and included the help of their first professional voice actor Jeff Morrow. The studio's first big creation was 1993 direct-to-video VeggieTales episode "Where's God When I'm S-Scared?" which was released on home video in late 1993. Not only would Vischer and Nawrocki serve as the producers and directors of the show, but they would also voice most of the characters in the franchise (the most by Vischer). In the middle of the segment would be a silly song. A normal segment of VeggieTales would begin with both talking vegetables on a countertop receiving a letter from someone asking about a particular Christian topic (selfishness, fear, lying, sharing, etcetera) followed by two short stories about the topic. They chose vegetables to serve as the characters because they were easier to animate than human characters. The characters they came up with were Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. The "Big Idea" for Vischer, was to teach children about right-from-wrong using God's messages from the Bible. Eventually, Phil Vischer and Nawrocki created VeggieTales and renamed the company to Big Idea Productions. It started out as a small business that used computer animation to make its films. Career Īccording to Vischer's 2005 autobiography, Me Myself and Bob, Vischer and his longtime friend Mike Nawrocki founded Big Idea Productions in the late 1980s as GRAFx Studios. Paul Bible College (currently known as Crown College) around that time, he also worked at a small Christian video production company. For three semesters, Vischer attended St. Phil Vischer was born Jin Muscatine, Iowa, United States, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Currently, he owns a small film business, Jellyfish Labs, based in Wheaton, Illinois. He provided the voice of Bob the Tomato and about half of the other characters in the series. Phillip Roger Vischer (born June 16, 1966) is an American filmmaker, author, speaker, podcast host, animator, musician, puppeteer, and voice actor who created the computer-animated video series VeggieTales alongside Mike Nawrocki.
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