What Ruined Veggietales’s Production? The Truth About It…

 Found The Story Of Veggietales’s Production Almost Ruined It!

• VeggieTales:
  • The first video, Where's God When I'm S-s-scared?!, was reportedly a nightmare to make. It began with Phil Vischer animating the entire thing himself, only to hire two more animators on the fly when it was clear he couldn't achieve the level of animation quality he was aiming for alone. The three animators then moved into a rented storefront for extra space, which stretched the already minuscule budget. The project was funded by a Christian mail-order service, with customers ordering the video while it was still in production, meaning that the creators were legally required to finish the project on a stone-set date, lest they be charged with mail fraud.
  • Rack, Shack, and Benny, while not nightmarish to the same degree, still reportedly had everyone suffering from exhaustion by the end of it due to the ambitious nature of the episode, and only 10 employees armed with four computers. Many of the original workers still say it was the hardest project they ever took on; it was only natural that the next episode, Dave and the Giant Pickle, was much smaller scale.
  • The Toy That Saved Christmas also had a troubled production, due to being another ambitious episode and having a very set-in-stone deadline (since you can't ship a Christmas special late). Not only did the episode end up Christmas Rushed, the air conditioning broke at the headquarters just in the wake of a heat wave hitting Chicago. Phil Vischer was bed-ridden afterwards for almost two months as well due to bacteria in his heart. It was so close to the deadline once production of the show had wrapped that one of the employees had to be flown down to Dallas, TX with a copy of the show in-hand to give to the tape duplicator because (in Robert Ellis' own words) "FedEx wasn't fast enough!". This was one of the few cases where the team was unsatisfied with the episode's original end result, and the following year they went back and re-animated a lot of the scenes, creating a second version of the show that was overall much cleaner than the original.
  • Towards the end of the production of "Esther...the Girl Who Became Queen", there was a server crash at Big Idea leading to two weeks worth of work on the show being lost. Most of the animators were forced to work overtime to make up for it.