Madame Blueberry’s insatiable want

Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, Madame Bovary. A couple millennia might separate the first three stories from the last, but the adulteress from Gustave Flaubert’s scandalous 1857 novel is not entirely out of place among this who’s who of Old Testament heroes. That’s because each of these characters’ stories took on a new life when they inspired episodes of VeggieTales, an American animated series for children that ran from 1993 to 2015. Created to communicate Christian values through the retelling of biblical stories, VeggieTales is known for starring anthropomorphic produce singing silly songs.

The story of Dave the young asparagus battling Goliath the giant pickle, for example, teaches us about overcoming our fear and God’s victory over the enemy. In addition to adapting stories from the Bible, VeggieTales also put their own spin on a handful of appropriately food-themed literary works, including the Grapes of Wrath and Frankencelery. But Madame Bovary? As a child of the 1990s who grew up watching the show (and reciting its lyrics by heart), it was many years into my study of French literature before I finally realized the connection — Flaubert’s heroine had become Madame Blueberry. But how? And why? Who picks up a French novel condemned for public indecency in its day, and sees it as an opportunity to teach children a moral lesson through the predicament of a singing blueberry? When I contacted that person, the show’s director Mike Nawrocki, he leapt at the chance to explain.

The story begins not in nineteenth-century Normandy, as Flaubert would have it, but in the American Midwest of the 1990s, where recent college graduates Nawrocki and his co-creator Phil Vischer pioneered one of the first CGI-animated video series. With computer-generated imagery in its infancy, the duo adopted a practical approach: their characters would all be fruits and vegetables, since the lack of limbs and clothing made for less complicated animation. Each episode featured the show’s hosts, Bob the Tomato (Vischer) and Larry the Cucumber (Nawrocki), telling a story that illustrates a Bible-based lesson, like the importance of helping others or telling the truth, with a Bible verse to sum it up as a takeaway for viewers.