Thursday, May 15, 2025

Incidental Julius Caesar in the Scottish Episode of VeggieTales

MacLarry and the Stinky Cheese Battle
. Dir. Mike Nawrocki. Perf. Mike Nawrocki, Phil Vischer, Henry Haggard, Jim Poole, Cydney Trent, and Brian Roberts. 2013. DVD.
 Big Idea Recorded (B.I. Owned), 2013.

Assuming that you've all read all of Bardfilm, I know that you know about the VeggieTales Hamlet (for which, q.v.).

Since that was fairly interesting, I was excited when someone mentioned MacLarry and the Stinky Cheese Battle. And that excitement grew when I saw the kilts and rough medieval costumes on the cover of the DVD. "What will they make of Macbeth?" I thought. "Will Lady Macsparagus have trouble getting tomato juice off her [admittedly non-existent] hands?"

Alas, although there are plenty of references to Scots and Scotland (and many Scottish accents), I found nothing that connected to Shakespeare's Scottish play—not even in "Silly Songs with MacLarry" (actually titled "Silly Songs with Scottish Larry") where it might have been most appropriate.

Instead, I found a quote from Julius Caesar (for inexplicable reasons, the key conflict is between the Romans and the Scots). Here it is:


There you have it: "Friends, Romans, Country fans," together with a very Kenneth Branaghesque visual annotation of each of those categories—wrapped up with a vegetable joke. It's not much, but it's at least something!

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest