Phil Vischer

Phillip Roger Vischer (born June 16, 1966) is an American filmmaker, animator, author, puppeteer, and voice actor. He is the creator of the computer-animated video series VeggieTales alongside Mike Nawrocki. He provided the voice of Bob the Tomato and about half of the other characters in the series. Currently, he owns a small film business, Jellyfish Labs, based in Wheaton, Illinois. Early life and education Phil Vischer was born June 16, 1966, in Muscatine, Iowa, United States, and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. For three semesters, Vischer attended St. Paul Bible College (currently known as Crown College); around that time, he also worked at a small Christian video production company. Career According to Vischer's autobiography, Me Myself and Bob, Vischer and his longtime friend Mike Nawrocki founded Big Idea Productions in the late 1980s as GRAFx Studios. It started out as a small business that used computer animation to make its films. Eventually, Phil Vischer and Nawrocki created VeggieTales and renamed the company to Big Idea Productions. The "Big Idea" for Vischer, was to teach children about right-from-wrong using God's messages from the Bible. The characters they came up with were Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. They chose vegetables to serve as the characters because they were easier to animate than human characters. A normal segment of VeggieTales would begin with both talking vegetables on a countertop receiving a letter from someone asking about a particular Christian topic (selfishness, fear, lying, sharing, etcetera) followed by two short stories about the topic. In the middle of the segment would be a silly song. Not only would Vischer and Nawrocki serve as the producers and directors of the show, but they would also voice most of the characters in the franchise (the most by Vischer). The studio's first big creation was 1993 direct-to-video VeggieTales episode "Where's God When I'm S-Scared?" which was released on home video in late 1993. Big Idea's next video was "God Wants Me To Forgive Them?!?" which was released in 1994 and included the help of their first professional voice actor Jeff Morrow. In 1995, the series' third video, "Are You My Neighbor?", was released and VeggieTales continued releasing at least one video per year and even released their own newsletter called "What's the Big Idea?". The series was an enormous hit and, by the late-1990s, had earned the company millions of dollars every year.