When Veggies Go Soft!!!

Can you have a VeggieTales movie without God in it? Apparently so. We went to see the new VeggieTales movie - "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" last night expecting something similar to the last 200 or so veggietales videos. Not so, something has definitely changed. There's no QWERTY computer with the Bible verse illustrating the show's theme, there's no "God made you special and He loves you very much!", no fun story with characters loosely based on Bible heroes. Nope, the name of God was left out of this one. The story was cute, the animation was great, the punch lines not as frequent but still there, even the silly songs were there (though jazzed up quite a bit - the veggies covered the B-52's Rock Lobster, only changing the lyrics to Rock Monster). All in all, fairly enjoyable. If you tilt your head and squint hard, you can even draw some corollaries between the father in the show and the Father in Heaven. But I really missed the unapologetic Christian nature of previous videos. If I'd never seen a VeggieTale movie before, I would have thought it was a great kids' movie. Knowing what they were like before though, I can't help but feel they've sold out. Bowed to the pressure of being politically correct. In their attempt to appeal to the masses, I'm afraid they've abandoned their core audience.