Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Davey and Goliath: “Good Neighbor”

Davey and Goliath is a much-ridiculed stop-action animated Christian children's TV series which used to be shown here in the Dallas / Fort Worth area on Sunday morning. For many years I was embarrassed to admit to having watched the show. Then I grew up and realized that the show's messages were not that bad.

Granted, from an adult perspective, it is very easy to find fault with the series. The characters were almost always white, the men and women rarely strayed outside of traditional gender roles and the show had the nerve to promote Christianity as a good thing. (Then again it was produced by the Lutheran Church in America so how can one realistically expect the show to do otherwise?) Moreover, the title character Davey had a talking dog named Goliath whose scenes have not exactly improved with age. (Though I can't help but wonder if that poor much-ridiculed mutt helped inspire the creation of Scooby-Doo or for that matter, the talking tiger in Calvin and Hobbes. After all, stranger things have happened.)

Anyway, the one episode I find myself remembering most often is the “Good Neighbor” episode, perhaps because it is one of the few episodes that does not end happily for Davey. The whole episode revolves around a local celebration of neighborliness in which free balloons declaring their owner to be a good neighbor are passed out on a first-come, first-served basis. Davey wants to get such a balloon but on the way to the celebration, he comes across a young girl who has gotten separated from her mother and he chooses to help her first. He is not the first person to pass the little girl in question but he is the first person who stops to help her out. In the process of trying to track down the girl's mother, Davey loses more and more time until when he finally does manage to reunite the girl with her mother, he is too late to get a balloon.

The irony of the episode? In proving himself to be a good neighbor, Davey loses his chance at any material reward while those people who were selfish enough to ignore the little girl's plight end up receiving all the balloons. And of course, the one such person who is most proud of his rep as a “good neighbor” ends up seeing his balloon burst.

The moral of the episode? We can't always expect to be materially rewarded for our good deeds. Indeed, doing good deeds in hope of a material reward is not what Christianity is supposed to be all about. Moreover, there will be times when in order to do a good deed, a sacrifice will be expected of you. It could be a sacrifice of time or a sacrifice of effort or a sacrifice of money or so forth. But there will be a sacrifice. In other words, you should perform a good deed because it needs to be done, not because you expect to get something out of it.

I know that sounds like an obvious lesson but when I first saw this episode, it did not seem so obvious. Even as an adult, I find myself having to remind myself of this lesson. After all, it is not the type of lesson most American TV shows and movies preach and it is certainly not the type of lesson promoted by many American politicians. Indeed, even many Christian adults seem to forget such a message -- which is why it is a good thing that TV shows like Davey and Goliath exist in the first place.