That’s apparently what NBC is telling Bob the Tomato, of VeggieTales fame.
Apparently, NBC has bought the rights to broadcast the Veggietales cartoon. But According to this LA Times Story, NBC feels that Bob the Tomato’s ending line, “Remember kids, God made you special and he loves you very much.”, and other sciptural references are way too offensive to air on TV. There has been extensive editing of the stories.
I have to wonder what in the heck is going on in everyone’s minds here. First, NBC purchased rights to broadcast a cartoon that has been extremely popular, because of the Judeo-Christian values that it promotes. But NBC decides that they need to remove those same values that have made it so popular. And Big Idea (or whatever media conglomerate they belong to now) decided to allow the heavily edited shows to be broadcast. Surely they had to have some inkling from the first editing demands that the outcome would potentially isolate the shows’ core support base.
Maybe I’m off base. Maybe this will be a good thing for everyone. But it just seems really, really stupid to me.
Last week I was in Philadelphia for our annual Disaster Recovery Testing. It’s pretty much a marathon session of restoring systems. It went well, but after about 48 hours of sleep deprivation, you reach a point where anything that anyone else says is funny. So last week’s humor revolved around Celebrity Jeopardy Videos, The Barry Gibbs Talk Show, and lots of videos from YouTube. But by far, the funniest thing was not shared until this morning.
The day before our testing started, I toured Independence Hall with a couple of other guys. That’s a really inspirational place to go. If you ever have a chance to see the place where the most important documents in our nation’s history were signed, do it! Here’s a photo of our tour guide:
After that, we toured the Liberty Bell.
Now, I saw the Liberty Bell last year. However, we were rushing through to see it before the museum closed. This year we had more time, and I really got to explore the exhibits. One of the neatest things to see was the casting of the inscription on the Liberty Bell. Because they prevent people from touching the bell, they made a casting of the words, making it much easier to read, and giving you the chance to touch it as well. I thought it would be really cool to get a closeup of me touching the words, ‘Proclaim Liberty’. So I took this photo:
If you’re easily offended, then please skip the rest of this post.
If you’re in the Hoover area this weekend, I invite you to swing by Hunter Street. We’ll be having out annual ‘Praise 150′ concert at 6:30, Sunday Night.
Again… No captions or backstory, but I’ve uploaded 3 more days worth of pictures into the local Gallery. Now you can view every unflattering, blurry, un-edited photo of the McGraw clan.
I will confess, however… of all the pictures that I took, this is my favorite:
