Upsetting Day: Dorbees: Making Decisions

Bob The Tomato From VeggieTales is going to hell. This isn't conjecture, this is a VeggieTales fact. The maker of VeggieTales has two hard and fast religious rules for the show that were passed down from his mother when he originally told her the concept. Number one is that Jesus can never be depicted as a vegetable. Our lord and savior is not a carrot, Phil. Number two is that the vegetables can never be shown experiencing the redemption of Christ. God did not send Tomato Jesus to die for tomato sins, therefore Bob The Tomato can never get into heaven. No matter how good and moral he is, Satan will be enjoying him on a nice chicken cob for eternity.

If you don't know what VeggieTales is, it's a non-denominational Christian show where vegetables teach children very general lessons about the Bible and Christ's love for them (but not the vegetables. It's very important the children understand Christ doesn't love the talking vegetables). It's enormously popular, but hardcore Christians hate it. There are several old Christian message boards with post topics like, "Is VeggieTales Of The Devil?", "Is VeggieTales Evil?", "Why I Don't Like VeggieTales." I'm pretty sure VeggieTales isn't evil but you know what is evil? The VeggieTales ripoff Dorbees: Making Decisions.

Benjy Gaither, the failson of a famous gospel singer whose family has huge Righteous Gemstones vibes, saw VeggieTales and decided it looked like something he could knock off pretty easily. He was so wrong. He was this amount of wrong.

Whoever animated Dorbees: Making Decisions missed arms day in animation school, so a lot of characters default to standing in Christ pose at random times. The characters' bodies grow and shrink randomly while they're speaking, and sometimes their facial features fall off completely, terrifying the children watching. Here's a snippet of the intro to prepare for the emotional trauma of what this animation looks like in motion.

Did you see something extra upsetting in that gif? Could it be the reason I found a review calling this movie "Mildly Racist Trash?" I thought that both mildly racist and trash were far too kind. We'll get to that.

While the main characters of VeggieTales are mostly moral vegetables trying to teach children Bible lessons, the Dorbees are antagonists to God. They're German fairytale characters meant to disobey the principles of the Bible and be punished as we watch so we may learn to fear their fates.

It's clear the VeggieTales characters are vegetables, but what are the Dorbees? It's explained in an extremely dramatic monologue, played as the camera flies through space. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. All that is seen and unseen, and in the panorama that is the unseen, beyond the secret world of the insect, beyond the atoms that form the grass they hide behind, in the infinitesimal pantheon that lives beneath our feet and beats with hearts anew live THE DORBEES. Pretty self-explanatory, right?

The Dorbees are microscope-ball people who hate God. One of them is called Flec, and he is crazy! It's simple. The theme song for the Dorbees is a jaunty 1950s big band song about how the singer dislikes the Dorbees and wishes they would go away.

"Dorbees, rolling down the halls, I see Dorbees

Tiny little balls, I see Dorbees

Why don't they go away?"

It's a great way to explain to your audience that they should immediately hate your show's characters. You don't want people to think they're in for something cute and likable when what they're actually getting is the most insane morality play to ever exist. Our narrator for the show is Old Delta Dorbee. He's definitely not a popular tomato man. He's an atomic affront to God's love like all the other Dorbees.

Old Delta Dorbee tells us tales of the Dorbees who live in Dorbee town. He says, "Life, in general, comes down to making decisions, the right decisions. The one the good lord wants you to make." So all of the characters in the story have to make big decisions, starting with Jack and Mary Jane Dorbee, who are voiced by real life brother and sister Benjy and Amy-Michelle Gaither. They want to skip school even though their school has a security system that will literally murder them if they try to leave.

After not making the decision the good lord would not want them to make and skipping school, the children are nearly crushed to death by the school's lethal traps. Then Jack loses all of his facial features and bounces away like a bouncy ball. Is this a Dorbees thing or an unfinished animation thing? We may never know because all of the information we have about the Dorbees is contained in one 44 minute, direct-to-video feature that may have been a pilot for a TV show.

We leave Jack and Mary Jane's story to hear the tale of a Swedish man named Otto shopping for clothes that will help him "fit in better with the common folk." I think Otto is supposed to be based on Arnold Schwarzenegger because of his accent and absurdly buff arms, but the Dorbees are all such monsters it's difficult to tell what his deal is.

This is the storyline others have kindly called mildly racist. Otto chooses to buy clothing at Dig's Duds. The proprietor, Dig, is introduced with a Barry White-style song intro that includes lots of moaning and saying his name. You remember him from the theme song, right? He's got an afro and gold tooth. He sings a song about how he sells clothes and then tries to sell Otto some clothes. This is apparently not the decision the good lord wanted him to make. We get a montage of Otto trying on outfits, some of which are silly and others every girl with ADHD on TikTok would spend $300 on.

This is all clothing that Dig has for sale in his store so he must think it's cool, right? Even the NASA egg. He purchased the Abraham Lincoln hat to resell. He must have expected a buyer would be out there somewhere.

We cut back to the kids who skipped school. Jack's face has grown back. He wants to sneak into an abandoned house. His sister specifically mentions how the Bible says they should honor their mom and dad, and their mom said they should not go inside the dangerous house. The kids sing a song about how they want to be grown up, and this leads them to decide to do some breaking and entering. Felons are the ultimate grown-ups!

As we cut between each of these stories we get a little palette cleanser clip. You would expect it would be more Old Delta Dorbee, but no. It's an unnamed Dorbee watching TV and slowly getting fatter as the stories go on until he crushes the chair he's sitting in. This is either a joke or a parable about gluttony? It's always good when you can't tell.

Now, this is where it gets kind of weird. It's Mr. Poe and Yogul, a classic show within a show that takes place on Dorbee German Access Television. Mr.Poe is a superhero, and Yogul is his nightmarish sidekick. In this sketch, they fight Doctor Dairy, a regular human cow who's probably terrified to find himself in the Dorbee world.

Dr. Dairy has strapped Yogul to a stretching rack in a cage over some kind of swirling vortex. I can't see where God or making decisions comes into play here except when Mr. Poe opens a random cabinet and finds three buttons, one to free poor Yogul, one to end World Hunger, and one for World Peace. Nothing is preventing him from pushing all three. He only chooses to release Yogul. As all Dorbee do, he shuns God's people for no reason! Why won't they go away?

That's it. That's the whole story of Mr. Poe and Yogul. We cut to a Dorbee man slowly growing fatter, then back to Dig's Duds, where Otto is about to check out. He asks Dig if he really looks good in Dig's clothes, and Dig says to camera, "You know I do stand to make quite a few greenbacks off my Icelandic brother…but I'm not sure I can actually say he looks good in those threads…of course, with all the money, I could go down to Tito's pawn shop and get my eight track back. I guess every Dorbee's got to make the right choice sometimes…"

Why can't Otto find anything to wear in Dig's store? Does he not sell pants and shirts? There's not a single item of clothing appropriate for Otto in Dig's store? Why is that, Dorbees? Why might that be? Dig makes the right decision and tells Otto to go next door to "Helga's House of Clothing For Buldging [sic] Swedish Men (Who Just Got Off The Boat And Need Some New Clothes)" instead.

First of all, that's a trap. Otto is about to get eaten. Also, does this mean that white Dorbees can't wear clothes made for black Dorbees? Is that what we're saying? If so, why do all the black Dorbee clothes look radical, and what's in the other store? Cannibals and khakis? Where do red and blue Dorbees fall on this spectrum? Otto should shop at Dig's!

With five minutes left in the show, we return to the haunted house. Jack finds Elivs and a big sign that says, "This way to Jimmy Hoffa," kind of a difficult joke to explain to a bunch of Christian children, but I guess that one was just for Mom and Dad? Eventually, Jack falls into a big hole and gets stuck, having to be rescued by the police. A news anchor reports from the scene, saying, "They did skip school and disobey their parents, so I can't help but feel that somehow that they deserve it."

Mr. Poe chose not to help others and was rewarded by saving Yogul's life. Jack and Mary-Jane chose to disobey their parents and were punished by falling into a hole. Dig chose not to sell radically close to Otto and sent Otto into what is undoubtedly a Swedish man meat factory while also depriving himself of some greenbacks to purchase back his eight track. All I can conclude is that this VeggieTales ripoff wants to teach children that God is chaotic and uncaring. The universe is random. Tiny ball people live under the grass. Bob The Tomato is going to hell, and nothing matters.

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