Click here (YouTube) for a notably lighter take on sacral-ritual warfare...
How do such cartoons promote scriptural education, especially among the young? How might they 'complicate' matters, with respect to the actual contents and tones of the Biblical texts themselves?
6 comments:
Cartoons tend to promote scriptural education a little more with exaggeration. Take this Veggie Tales for example, talking vegetables teaching children about the bible through songs and stories. I grew up watching this with my brother and my grandfather, who introduced us to it.
The problem with watching these kinds of scriptural education, is that children tend to just focus on the fact that there are funny talking vegetables doing silly things. Instead of learning the message they are trying to get across. This is why my grandfather would watch with us and ask us what we learned and then explain to my brother and I even more. Another problem is definitely the tone, but technically that is also due to rating. You can try to show a five year old a more realistic display of what is really said in the Biblical text but it may not be pleasant afterwards for the child. If that makes sense.
I don’t think I agree with how this video portrays the Bible to children. While it’s not totally inaccurate, it just hits the main points and exaggerates or changed the small things. Like the weird fake French accents for the people of Jericho or how Moses just went straight to what God said… Where as in the Bible he hesitated.
I didn't really watch much of veggie tales as a kid, so I can't really say much of how it effected my thinking towards the bible. But to be taught a story one way, and then to learn later on that it was much more detailed or gruesome or whatever... That just doesn't float my boat.
One important thing that is lost in the translation of scripture to cartoon is the sheer scale of what happened at Jericho. It wasn't merely a few wanderers coming out of the desert. The entirety of the Isrialite peoples were there. Everyone from the women and children to the warriors and farmers was there. They are described as "covering the land" in some texts.
Indeed, it's a tricky business introducing kids to 'grown-up' Bible stories. How do you really convey the notion of 'herem' (nihilistic/sacrificial holy-war) to children, after all? A question for me remains what effects such presentations have upon adult memories and (mis)understandings of scriptural stories.
Timi, I'm (just) guessing the French accents are a riff off of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'... itself a different kind of classic!
pdk
Ah true, it might be! I didn't really consider that.
I use to watch veggie tales as a kid, and i really enjoyed singing along with vegetables that cracked jokes. The stories are religious but there is so much going on in the cartoon like for the fact you are watching vegetables sing, dance and crack jokes. It lightens the load of these stories and it gets the moral of the story across.
-Taylor E.
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