IF, IN 1995, you'd told someone that the most successful series in the history of children's ministry was going to be computer generated talking vegetables you'd no doubt have soon been asked by a white-coated professional if you heard voices coming from your Bird's Eye packs.

I wondered whether Phil thinks that Americans generally have a big problem with irony. He agrees, "Yeah, I'm big on irony. There seems to be a school of thought in Hollywood saying that the thing that is funny is the thing that grosses you up the most. And if you notice, you can watch all the episodes of Veggie Tales and there's not one gross-out joke! So in every aspect of my business I think that cleverness is the key to success, especially in humour. So I'm trying to find writers right now and it's driving me mad, 'cause I'm writing everything, except for the silly songs, which Larry The Cucumber writes. I wrote the first one, which is very Pythonesque."

As a long time fan of the series, there is one observation that I have made about the baddies in Veggie Tales. For some strange reason, they always have English accents! So, Mr Vischer, what's going on? He hesitates, "Well, they're a little bit proper, and a little bit overly starched! And the French peas are there too! Somebody said to me, 'Hey, this lot isn't going to sell in Montreal as you're making fun of the French,' and I thought, 'Well, the whole world is making fun of the French!' And besides, the French peas are a homage to John Cleese standing on top of the castle hurling down insults, in The Holy Grail, so it's a homage to the English making fun of the French! But I still haven't seen the sales figures from Quebec! So anyway, we'll try and work on some heroic Englishman!"

So has Phil been surprised how much it's picked up and been a success? He was candid in his response, "Before I started I rented a whole bunch of Christian children's videos and watched them, and it occurred to me a couple of things. Number one, those aren't very good, and number two, if I could make something that was good, I bet people would really like it. So I knew what I had in my head, and I figured that if it was possible to get it out that it would sell, and I was right. So in a sense, no, I'm not surprised because I knew what the state of the market was and I really feel that God made me to do this. I know what abilities he's given me and I intend to use them for the rest of my life to try to accomplish as much as I possibly, possibly can. So when some people say, 'Did you ever think it would be this successful?', my immediate reaction is, 'We're just getting started!" We're just entering the general market and we haven't built our theme park yet, so we're nowhere near done!" He breaks off and laughs.

So what motivates Phil to give so much time and energy into Veggie Tales? It's soon clear that there are some very big issues in Phil's head! "I kind of see morality in our culture as a seesaw, and Hollywood as an 800 pound gorilla sitting on one side of the seesaw and no one is sitting on the other side, except for these TV evangelists who buy air time to say, 'Don't watch Hollywood.' It doesn't do any good. So my call in life is to sit heavily on the other side of the seesaw and to try to offset the influence of Hollywood. The media affects a society, they can shape a society's beliefs which then in turn is reflected by its politicians, so if you want to affect politics, don't become a politician, work in the media! You can literally shape culture through the power of television and movies. No one is really doing it effectively from a Christian worldview. So Big Idea is supposed to j be a little Disney that can use the media extremely effectively to affect our culture.

So what does Phil Vischer think of Disney? "Walt Disney is my animating hero. Now Disney, after he died, and Michael Eisner took over, just went for shareholder returns, and it just snowballed and it is now a maniacally successful company, but it's no longer driven by Walt's desire to make people happy and that's what he wanted to do every morning when he got up. I want to change the world morally, and that's what I do when I get up. Michael Eisner wants to increase the value of the company so the stock will go up and shareholders will make money. That's why he gets up in the morning. When a product with the name Big Idea on it comes out, people know they are getting good values and quality and morality."

But the Veggie Tales videos are so much more than that, they are also good entertainment, top quality compared to much of Christian kids stuff. Phil was straight to the point, "It has to be. Very early on I wrote in one of our mailers that we wanted to make shows that people would watch because they were good, not simply because they were Christian."

I wondered whether Phil felt like a pioneer as a Christian in the field of animation? "There are a lot of animation studios that are closer to the cutting edge than we are," he responded. "We kind of have a philosophy that the best place to be is just inside the cutting edge, so that you can watch the other guys fall off it! We are using the best commercially available products that you can buy as opposed to actually creating our own. So in a sense for Christian artists we're pretty much on the cutting edge, but I never want to hide behind that, 'Well, this is good for being Christian,' so I don't compare myself to what other Christian studios are doing. I compare myself to Disney or Industrial Light & Magic, or others in Hollywood. But Toy Story on a per minute basis cost about a hundred times more than Veggie Tales, but we're using the same hardware and the software is very similar, so where we are really innovating is a lot in production methodologies and applying software to solving problems to make our shows affordable. So I get very frustrated because I feel that as Christians we should be leading the world creatively. Instead it seems like we're always playing catch up, or parodying things that the world is doing."

Phil Vischer is a man with a passionate vision and the expertise to fulfil it. In the future, generations of children may well look back at the series as the place where they were first challenged about issues of lifestyle and faith. Perhaps it'll be the only time that you'll be able to persuade the children you know that vegetables are good for them!