The Wit and Wisdom Behind “Little Dogs on the Prairie”
| By: Dr. Tom Snyder; ©2001 |
| Tom Snyder interviews Nathan Carlson and Jeff Parker, the two head writers behind the family cartoon seriesLittle Dogs on the Prairie |
BEHIND THE SCENES PEOPLE WHO WRITE FUNNY STUFF THE WIT AND WISDOM BEHIND LITTLE DOGS ON THE PRAIRIE
If you ask Nathan Carlson and Jeff Parker, the two head writers behind Little Dogs on the Prairie, a new family cartoon series from Tommy Nelson’s home video department, to describe their job, they say they’re just “people who write funny stuff.”
Little Dogs on the Prairie is more than just another funny cartoon for families, however.
In fact, MOVIEGUIDE® publisher, Dr. Ted Baehr, recently wrote, “Little Dogs on the Prairie is the funniest, best conceived and well-written cartoons that I have had the opportunity to review. The music is terrific, and the writing is witty, clever, fast-paced, and interesting. The characters are real, the storylines are clear, the premises are powerful.”
The cartoon series, which just came out with its third video of three little parables, is set in a small community of talking prairie dog critters. Each cartoon uses a hilarious, wacky series of events to send a message based on a Bible verse.
Besides his writing duties, Nathan, who came up with the original idea behind the series after watching a TV nature program on prairie dogs, also voices some of the characters. Jeff does the directing duties. A third writer, Phil Lollar, pitches in on the cartoons, and all three men share the role of producer.
During a relaxing lunch near their Hollywood studio, Jeff and Nathan told MOVIEGUIDE® the history behind Little Dogs on the Prairie.
Nathan and Jeff have been writing together since 1985, when they started at Agape Land. One of Jeff’s first assignments was to write a stage play version of a record called “The Birthday Party.” Nathan was the voice of the main character.
“The guy who ran the company said, ‘Do you want to talk to the guy who does the voice?’” Jeff recalls. “I said sure, and we hit it off immediately. We were going through the script and Nathan ad-libbed something that put me on the floor, that was really funny. I said, ‘That’s great!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it’s not in the script.’ I typed it in and said, ‘Well, it is now!’
“That’s all it took for me to become drunk with the power of writing,” Jeff said facetiously.
“We had a very unusual, remarkable camaraderie,” he added seriously.
“We used to get in trouble at Agape,” Nathan remembers. “The office manager would come by and say, ‘You guys are laughing too much, having too much fun. You’re not working here.’”
Jeff burst in, “We went, ‘This is our job. If we’re not laughing, then we’re really not working.’”
From that moment, the two humorists talked about starting their own production company, a place where they could, as Nathan put it, “do our own material and enjoy our own sense of humor.” Even so, it still sounded like a pipe dream to Nathan. Today, however, that pipe dream has come true, in a company they call Fancy Monkey Studios.
“I was just remarking to Jeff the other day,” Nathan said, “how incredible it is that it has actually turned out we are doing this, the very thing that we talked about. It was a first for me, to actually do something that I talk about doing. So here we are today, writing crazy, funny stuff.” “And applying for HUGE lines of credit,” Jeff joked.
Their first major collaboration after Agape Land was the Jungle Jam music records, which developed into a radio show on more than 700 stations. Jeff said he showed Nathan what he had done so far on the project and Nathan started doing the voices for it and “took it to a whole other level.”
“We started doing wacky stuff,” Nathan said. “As I recall, every time we worked on it, we would come up with something that just struck us hilariously funny. My first reaction always is, ‘That’s great, but we can’t really do that, can we?’ Thus began our quest to ‘push the envelope’ in the name of having a great time and putting out a good message at the same time.”
In that light, Jeff recalled one joke on the Jungle Jam radio show which referred to atomic fusion and ended in the sound of a big explosion. The company doing distribution said, “You better not do that. That is going to get a lot of negative mail.”
Jeff said, “We made the decision that we thought it was funny and that, if there was ‘crit’ [or critical] mail, we would live with it, but we really thought our listeners would probably get the fact that we were doing comedy. They would understand that. And, it proved to be 100 percent accurate. We did not get one crit letter. Everybody got the joke. That’s when we started getting the confidence to say, ‘We can do things that are a little more adventurous, humor wise. We can do things that are a little more unexpected, a little more inventive, and it will be okay with our audience.’ The radio show allowed us to explore what we could do.
“One of the reasons we can get away with some of that stuff,” Jeff added, “is that we don’t hide the real heart of where we’re coming from. When people can see the heart of what we’re writing, then they don’t assume that we have any kind of negative or malicious intent in anything that we write. Not only do kids get it, but their parents also enjoy it.”
Jeff said one of the great fears in working for the Christian market, especially when it comes to writing for children, is that you can’t show adults being fallible.
“We tend to go a little bit more realistic in that respect,” he said. “It’s more likely that a child is going to see an adult make mistakes in their lifetime than they are going to see adults who are perfect. It seems like it’s more valuable to not hide that in our material and let children see how adults can learn from their mistakes just like kids are supposed to learn from their mistakes.”
Nathan said, “What we enjoy about what we do is that we’re really communicating really important, relevant messages. The vehicle that we’re able to use is one that is very palatable to most people and most age groups. If we can use humor and stories where we can watch other people and laugh at ourselves through them, it tends to be something that really sticks to your mind and to your heart. One thing people like to do when they get together is share a funny story. Funny stories seem to stay in your mind because you go, ‘Oh, I want to remember that and tell it and laugh at it again.’ What a great vehicle to use to tell an important message because then you’re continually bringing that message back to your mind in a humorous and enjoyable way.
“The truth of it is, we both love the Lord and we both are enormously grateful to have the blessing to make our living and pursue our life’s dream and career and have it be something that is a ministry to people and a blessing to God. At least, He hasn’t let us know yet that it isn’t a blessing to Him.”
“That letter could come at any time,” Jeff laughed.
