Ok, so I do grill on Bob and Larry quite a bit on this blog, but the honest truth is I do have a soft spot for VeggieTales. It wasn't a huge part of my life for very long but in a way it embodies what I grew to like about cartoons. VeggieTales lacked the disgusting humor of SpongeBob SquarePants and the inane action of Pokemon, opting for dry humor. It became very risky when the videos kept coming on (I remember being in awe of but baffled by the more serious tone of the Veggie's take on the Biblical tale of Esther), but they manage to be entertaining without being in-your-face.The Toy That Saved Christmas was the first VeggieTale I saw. I got the tape for Christmas in first grade, which was right around the peak of the franchise's popularity. It doesn't hold a candle to most holiday standards. The story is very rushed for one thing, but it's message is plain and clear and it's a damn good message: as Grandpa George says right in the special "Christmas isn't about getting, it's about giving!" While it's very short and very rushed and the humor is more low-key than in other VeggieTales installments, The Toy That Saved Christmas is still fairly entertaining and really warms your heart. Even if Buzz-Saw Louie was clearly Big Idea's attempt at trying to make their way up to Pixar standards (remember, this video showed up in Christian bookstores a year after Toy Story's release) and he's a bit on the bland side, Bob and Larry's always-great chemistry and the overall mood save this.
And of course, I'd be stupid to ignore the Silly Song with Larry. "Oh, Santa!". About 5 years ago, I was on a Boy Scout camping trip and a very dark-minded child named Mitchell kept playing that song on a tape recorder to annoy everybody. When we finally took the cassette player when he wasn't looking, we listened in complete confusion and then discovered the rest of the cassette (labeled "Songs with Larry") we discovered it was just Mitchell singing very dark songs about death and doom till the end of the earth. It was hilarious and that connection alone gets The Toy That Saved Christmas on the list.
Buy it from Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/VeggieTales-Toy-That-Saved-Christmas/dp/B00006JDVN/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1260924430&sr=1-1
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