Dorbees: Making Decisions (1998)
The nightmare fuel VeggieTales clone from Hell
Before diving headfirst into the shallow pool that is Dorbees: Making Decisions and then dealing with the resulting brain damage, let me first introduce you to one Benjy Gaither. Son of two well-known gospel musicians, Gloria and Bill Gaither, Benjy has had a fairly successful career in various media industry jobs. A musician since the age of 4, Benjy has played Carnegie Hall and has some music you can hear online, including the song “YouTube.”
(With all fairness to Benjy, I think this is Google’s AI just having a real hard time existing). Gaither mainly sings Christian-themed country, which befits the animated productions that his company, Live Bait Productions, has put out. As an animation producer, Gaither has made a handful of projects, including a show called Gaither’s Pond, which features a series of Christian musicians animated as sea creatures singing songs and stuff. It looks a little something like this:
Post-Dorbees, Gaither voice acted in a few projects, including the two Hoodwinked films, and he was part of a comedy ghost hunting show that was never released. But the trailer for it still exists, and I have to say, after watching Dorbees, I was pleasantly entertained by the admittedly basic humor of it. That said, the show doesn’t come off quite as Christian and Holy as Gaither’s image otherwise presents:
We’ll leave it at that. The Ghost Munchers trailer on Gaither’s Facebook page has one or two funny bits, and its crude production appears to be an asset as opposed to a problem. The show, as far as I could find, was never picked up.
Now, on to some truly cursed images.
Dorbees: Making Decisions begins with a voiceover that is nearly indecipherable under the booming sound of Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” being bastardized on what sounds like a Casio keyboard set to the trumpet voice setting. He is saying something about Dorbees and how they came to be, but it is ultimately not that important, just so long as you get on board with the fact that this world is populated not by humans but by sentient balls called “Dorbees.”
There is an opening theme tune to this project, which leads me to believe that this was a failed TV pilot of some sort. We get a montage of clips of Dorbees doing their doorbiest Doorbee things, while the song croons over the top, the lyrics bemoaning the very existence of these weird little creatures. “Why don’t they go away?” the singer continues to ask, which is an intriguing question made all the more fascinating considering the singer himself appears to be a Dorbee.
“They are Dorbees …. Why don’t they go away?” It’s a good question, honestly. Why don’t they go away? They are, after all, a fictional creation made by the same people who wrote the song that poses the very question. There very easily could have been a world where there were never Dorbees around who needed to go away in the first place, yet here we are. There is an odd, nagging existential absurdism to the question and to the circumstances of its asking. Why doesn’t anything just go away? Why is anything here to begin with? Being, as a concept, is implicated in the opening moments of Dorbees, begging us to ponder what we are doing in our own lives, on our own planes of existence. Are we not ourselves Dorbees after a fashion? Asking why we are here, why we don’t just go away, as it were. Questioning our relative value in this vast world.
When the song ends, we are immediately dropped into a world with no context (aside from the aforementioned fact that Dorbees are a thing, despite everyone seemingly wanting them to go away). Delta (Ty Smith), an old blues musician Dorbee, tells us that he is an old blues musician. Then, a fiendish little Dorbee called Flec (Gaither) starts rambling on at hyper speed about corn fritters and mouth harps. A title card appears on the screen declaring Flec “Crazy!”
It is only after Flec does … whatever it is that he does that Delta establishes what the point of this show is. The mission is to learn how to make decisions and, specifically, to make the right decisions that the good Lord wants you to make. Delta tells us about Jack (Gaither) and Mary-Jane Dorbee (Amy Gaither-Hayes) – I guess all Dorbees have the last name “Dorbee,” like my last name is “Human Being, For Sure a Human Being.” According to Delta, Jack may be on the wrong side of the Lord, because he wants to skip school. (One way ticket to Hell, I tell ya).
Dorbees: Making Decisions is ostensibly children’s educational content. It’s a nightmarish VeggieTales, really. The least the video could do is provide actual learning material. Instead, the teacher character spouts off nonsense (again, at hyper speed) about geometry. Most of it is complete gibberish, but the one thing that comes close to a real geometric concept is plain incorrect. He tells the class that the sum of the interior angles in a triangle is 90 degrees, which is just not true. Then again, mathematics is the Devil’s magic – it’s the only way we get to 666, after all – so perhaps the film is on to something …
So, Jack and Mary-Jane escape the prison-like school, but before we can see how that plays out, we cut to Otto (Smith), a body-building Arnold Schwarzenegger sound-alike Dorbee. Otto wants to buy clothes that will help him fit in with the “common folk.” It’s not super clear what this has to do with the moralizing, “making decisions” angle of the film. The owner of the clothing shop, Dig (Marshall Hall), implies that shopping for clothes has something to do with making choices, but the rest of the song doesn’t really make a lot of sense. He just says things that fit the rhyme:
When it comes to shopping /
you know you’re cold-cocking
Like my good friend Huggy Bear /
you won’t go anywhere
What does this mean? I don’t know anything about this Huggy Bear, for one. But also, what does he mean by “you won’t go anywhere.” There’s no elaboration on this point. It’s quite ominous, almost upsetting in its vagueness.
What’s more upsetting? That Jack wants to disobey his parents and, in doing so, disobey God Himself! Blasphemy.
Truthfully, Jack just wants to grow up. So does Mary-Jane (“I’m just a ball / I want to be grown up!”) And I suppose the conduit to maturity is breaking into someone’s home. So that’s what they do!
To put on my serious film critic hat for a second, Dorbees: Making Decisions is a sporadic, unstructured mess. Scenes barely thread together in a legible way. There are cutaways to an unnamed Dorbee watching a television, insinuating that he is watching what we have been watching, and that acts as a transition between segments. But the segments themselves barely have a connection to anything that has come before. The Jack and Mary-Jane storyline has some continuity, but the songs they sing are just as nonsensical as the others.
At one point, the “television” flips to German public access programming, which is playing a show in which an evil cow’s world takeover plot is foiled by two superheroes (?) called Mr. Poe and Yogul. It is as non sequitur as a Family Guy bit, except that it goes on for far longer than the average Family Guy cutaway. At least the theme song to the fictional show is a legitimate bop, and I believe I enjoyed this segment on the level that the creators wanted me to (I sensed intentional irony in the writing … I think).
If this was, as I suspect, an attempt at getting a VeggieTales-esque show greenlit, then the problem is glaringly obvious. There is no cohesion. None of the scenes make sense, either in isolation or in the context of the rest of the program. The idea for discrete segments that each teach a lesson about “making decisions” with wacky characters and silly songs is just fine, in concept, but as it appears here it is a jumble of pseudo-moralistic mumbo-jumbo. Dig learns that he shouldn’t sell clothes to Otto, a paying customer who is looking for clothes. Why not? Even if Dig thinks the clothes don’t look good on the maybe-Austrian, maybe-Icelandic, maybe-Swedish bodybuilder, it’s not his decision whether Otto wants to buy the clothes or not.
Meanwhile, Jack and Mary-Jane break into the house, and Jack gets trapped, I think. It’s unclear, because Flec shows up, and I can barely understand what the actor is saying with that voice and rate of speech. So the kids have to fess up and turn themselves in. Jack confronts his father and asks for forgiveness, kind of. His father actually seems pretty cool with the whole ordeal. So they learn that … tomorrow is a brand new day? Again, not sure what the point is. And even though Delta comes in at the end to tell all the good children watching that the Good Lord will show them the way, nothing that happens inside the story of the episode really confirms or provides evidence for that fact. If anything, the absence of godliness worked just fine for Jack and Mary-Jane, who faced seemingly no consequences for their actions.
At Bleeding Eye Cinema, we don’t rate movies based on their artistic merits. We rate them based on strangeness, on a scale from Colin Hanks1 to full-on, run-to-the-eyewash-station Eye Bleeder.
Dorbees: Making Decisions rates as: Certified Eye Bleeder (5/5)
Colin Hanks is the true cinematic touchstone of milquetoast normieness – no offense, Colin.