Five years removed from the loss of his first company (Big Idea Productions, which is now owned by Classic Media), Vischer is on the cusp of launching JellyTelly—a Web-based, Christian Dave to Nickelodeon’s Giant Pickle (that’s David and Goliath for those unfamiliar with the VeggieTales catalog). Vischer’s determination to teach kids about the Christian faith through entertaining and engaging programming, distribute that programming via the Internet using an innovative business model, and tell his tale about the media empire that got away make him a fascinating case study for creative Christians everywhere.
The Death of Big Idea
Big Idea Productions is best known for VeggieTales, the series created by Vischer and Mike Nawrocki and featuring the aforementioned animated vegetables, including Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. Despite millions upon millions of home video sales, Big Idea fell into financial and legal trouble. Vischer tells the tragic story with humor and heartbreaking detail on his blog (www.philvischer.com – “What Happened to Big Idea?”) and in his book, Me, Myself & Bob, so I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow account here. Instead, I asked Vischer if it was difficult for him to recount the loss of Big Idea and VeggieTales, including his managerial mistakes and the personal pain he experienced.
“Not really,” he says nonchalantly. “It attracted so much interest that people were just speculating wildly about what killed Big Idea, and so part of it was just a desire to just tell the whole story.” Beyond just rumor control, Vischer’s natural instincts as a Christian storyteller and moral-teacher also come into play. He views his experience with Big Idea, both the highs and the lows, as an opportunity.
“It’s really a story about what God did in my life as much as it is about this business that lived and died, and that’s always a great story to tell. And when I tell that story, I’ve got 40-year-old guys coming up to me in tears saying, ‘Thank you for sharing your story because I lost something. I had a business venture that failed. I had a marriage that failed. I had this personal disaster, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it all these years.’ And my story has been able to minister to people in ways that have just blown me away.”
As Vischer reflects on the Big Idea drama one more time, it’s with a sense of closure. He seems to have made peace with what happened, especially in light of the good he sees coming from that chapter in his life. With that chapter closed, it’s no surprise that someone as creative and energetic as Vischer has a new project into which he can pour his talent.
That new project is his forthcoming online kids network, JellyTelly, a product of his creative shop, Jellyfish Labs. Though you wouldn’t know it from JellyTelly’s lighthearted content, the network exists because Vischer has a serious problem with Christians in North America.
The Gospel and the Next Generation
“We’re not living the gospel,” Vischer states plainly. “We’re preaching the gospel, but it seems that we’ve spent the last 30 years or so trying to motivate ourselves as a voting block more than as the Church, and, as a result, 80% of non-Christians have a negative view of Christianity.” The distracted Church has missed the mark and become the ineffective Church, but Vischer has a plan. It’s the reason he’s launching JellyTelly.
“I think the best way to start to shift the pendulum back to a generation of Christians that’s, first and foremost, living the gospel is to start by partnering with parents,” he says. “Let’s raise a generation that has grown up seeing examples of the gospel in action, not just hearing it preached in a sermon.”
It’s with that motivation that JellyTelly has a purpose that transcends entertainment and entrepreneurship. Vischer says the average American child consumes about five hours of electronic media per day—a staggering figure—and he wants a piece of that. JellyTelly.com will offer viewers 15-20 minutes of original, on-demand content a day, as well as games featuring characters from the network’s mini-programs. All of it will be fun for the kids while remaining faithful to Vischer’s vision by teaching Bible stories, character formation, and Christian values.
Fifteen minutes of wholesome JellyTelly doesn’t seem like much in comparison to five hours of Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, DVDs, and video games, but it’s a start. (Besides, Vischer notes, “even at our peak with VeggieTales we were only telling a story to kids about twice a year,” whereas JellyTelly affords him the opportunity to talk to kids everyday.) Obviously, Vischer is hopeful JellyTelly can grow from its “mini” beginnings and that a generation of JellyTelly viewers can grow into people who live the gospel in their culture. For all that to happen, JellyTelly has to find an audience and earn enough revenue to keep the lights on. Luckily, the business model behind the fledgling network appears just as creative as the content that will soon stream from it.
Welcome to the Web
With VeggieTales, Vischer impacted families through VHS tapes and DVDs, but he knows that what worked for the last 15 years isn’t necessarily here to stay. Instead, he’s asking, “How are we going to [reach kids] over the next 15 years? Because kids aren’t walking around with VHS cassettes under their arms anymore.” Since home video isn’t the right avenue for JellyTelly, what about a new broadcast TV network? Unfortunately, Vischer lacks the more than $100 million necessary for such an operation (not to mention that 24 hours of programming a day is a lot more difficult to produce than 15-20 minutes). That leaves the Internet, a venue in which people with big ideas (pun intended) can start small.
The Internet also is conducive to unorthodox pricing strategies such as Radiohead’s famous name-your-own-price-for-In-Rainbows offering. JellyTelly has a similar model in mind, provided they can build the software and accounting infrastructure to support it. “It’s subscription-based,” Vischer reveals. “We want to let everyone try it for free for a month, and then at the end of the month, pick whatever price they want to pay” at or above a minimum of $1 or $2. The model allows JellyTelly to make its way into a lot of homes, and it encourages customers to measure the value of the service for their family and pay accordingly. “If they want to pay more, that’s great,” he admits, “they’ll help fund more shows. If they can’t afford it right now, that’s fine, too.”
Using the Internet as a content delivery system also affects the content itself, not just the way in which the content generates revenue. What worked for VeggieTales installments destined for VHS tapes and DVDs doesn’t translate to a browser window. “When we sat down to write VeggieTales videos, we knew that in some cases the whole family was going to get together, pop popcorn, dim the lights, and watch it all together like it was a movie. And they were really looking for a cinematic experience, which means long, elaborate storytelling, 40-plus minutes, pretty big budgets, elaborate special effects, and music production.”
After all, VeggieTales releases were semi-annual events. The Internet, with its millions of YouTube videos that are mere minutes in length, demands a different approach from Vischer and the JellyTelly team. “For the Web, this is much more Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. This is kids coming every day and wanting to watch short clips, so we’re making these mini-shows that are anywhere from two minutes to eight minutes long and that just teach one topic and do it very simply.”
In addition to brevity, humor will also be a fixture on JellyTelly. “It’s humor-driven because that’s easy to do on the tiny screen.” Short, funny videos are “fairly simple and inexpensive, so that we can produce a lot of it.” Vischer says. For JellyTelly to achieve its goal of influencing the next generation of Christians, “it’s more important that there’s something engaging every day than that there’s one amazing Pixar film that took three years to make. That model doesn’t really work for this.”
In JellyTelly’s web-based, price-flexible mini-network, it appears that Vischer has found a model that’s going to work. It’s easy to envision thousands of Christian families subscribing to his service because of the access it provides to meaningful media that will help them raise their kids to be people who live the gospel.
And when it comes to models, Vischer is a good one for Christians who would dare tell stories. While creativity without conviction can produce more entertainment than education, and while conviction without creativity can produce more boredom than edification, Phil Vischer possesses both. The result? A message that will likely find its mark when JellyTelly opens for business this fall.
To find out more about JellyTelly, visit www.jellytelly.com. For more about Phil Vischer, visit www.philvischer.com.