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.

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Davey and Goliath: “The Polka Dot Tie”

It has become so hip nowadays to make fun of the old stop-motion animated children's TV series Davey and Goliath that I sometimes forget how progressive this show could be. For example, this series once devoted an episode to a 1962 parable about racism which never quite mentions racism yet comes closer to mentioning it than most other animated shows of the era. Yet today hardly anyone remembers it.

Granted, messages of racial tolerance were not rare in 1962 when the African-American civil rights movement was in full swing, but they certainly were not very common in most American cartoon shows. And given the fact that Davey and Goliath is usually considered a conservative show because of its emphasis on overt Christian messages, the anti-racism message in this episode seems especially astounding.

To be fair, the episode never comes out and overtly argues on behalf of racial tolerance. But it was one of the first episodes to feature a black character and it is not very hard to connect the dots between the fuss title character Davey makes over said character's polka dot tie and the fuss many real-life adults in 1962 would have made about said character's skin color.

Of course, this being a positive show, Davey eventually comes around and accepts the friendship of the black character after his sister Sally spends the entire episode treating Davey as a fool for initially doing otherwise. And no one thinks anything of it.

It would be nice to believe that all racial conflicts were so easily settled back in 1962, but alas, I suspect otherwise. However, it is nice to see that even back then, some people's hearts were in the right place.

Hey, I Remember This Show: Davey and Goliath

From the maker of Gumby, it's the Sunday morning Claymation effort that most hipsters -- apart from maybe Kevin Smith -- love to poke fun at. Yet I always had a soft spot for this show. Perhaps it is because I grew up watching it on Sunday mornings. Or perhaps because I appreciate the way it tried to get across moral lessons in a kid-friendly way that seems a considerable contrast to the glorified toy commercials that would dominate children's programming in later decades.

I am still haunted by the episode in which young Davey lost the chance to get a Good Neighbor prize because he was too busy helping out a young girl. The obvious moral: one should not always expect a reward for doing a good deed, even if said deed seems necessary, seems rather obvious to the adult me but to the me who first watched it as a child, it seemed like a major revelation.

Granted, it took me a few years of living to appreciate these cartoons. (After all, a lot of the life lessons they taught were not ones that little kids my age were particularly eager to learn.) But I eventually came around.

I hope you all enjoy it.