Gaither’s Pond is one of those television productions you watch the first five seconds of and then say to yourself, “Somehow, someway, with all of our advancements and progress, we humans made this.” This “show” was created by Bill, Gloria and Benjy Gaither. Bill Gaither is a singer-songwriter who is part of a singing group called the Gaither Vocal Band. They do Christian and gospel songs and the group itself is pretty popular within the community. The show stars not only Bill and Gloria but also a whole slew of people including those from the Vocal Band and other people within his circle. Each character is voiced by one of the members and each character looks like their respected voice actor. Gaither’s Pond is a Christian computer-animated cartoon very much in the style of VeggieTales, except the staff behind VeggieTales actually tried to make a computer-animated program. The show was made in 1997 and ended in 2003. Despite the gap, there were only four episodes made. The show was originally direct to video before it was brought to television on the KTV channel, at the convenient hour of 5:30 A.M.
The plot of Gaither’s Pond includes some animals and insects and one sentient plant that hang out in a huge pond. They go about their days and learn wholesome morals. I would say that they were Christian morals, except God is barely even mentioned in any of the episodes or not at all. There are also some songs in each episode performed by the various characters. Most notably, the Vocal Band makes appearances in the show as a group of fish. Not only do the characters resemble their voice actor, but their names are also puns of the actor’s name. Sometimes they’re not even puns; it’s just the actor’s first or last name but with an animal name in place of it. For instance, Carp Lowry is based on his voice actor Mark Lowry, a member of the Vocal Band.
One episode “Fishtales” is about a Carp Lowry spreading gossip on his blog page. Another episode “The Great Divide” is about some beavers that are pretty much Italian mafia stereotypes who convince the denizens of the pond to build a dam to separate the folks dubbed “Wavemakers” (who like dancing and singing) and the folks who don’t like the Wavemakers (even though most of the characters in and out of this episode sing and dance anyway). The dam building and community dividing get to a point where parts of the pond start drying up, somehow.
There’s also some weird political stuff in two of the episodes, such as one of the fish characters Big Bass Bill voiced by Bill Gaither himself, is the president of the pond but, there’s an in-joke where all the characters mention that he’s been their president for as long as they can remember and that he is going to be their leader forever (his title switches in different episodes). At the end of “The Great Divide”, when the plan fails the beavers move onto to a place where the leader says, “they’re not afraid of a little division” and then follows up with “Washington D.C.”
I honestly wish I was making this stuff up.
The animation is the ugliest and most terrifying yet hilarious thing I have ever seen. It makes a show like Butt Ugly Martians look like the movie Up and that’s a hard feat. The animators basically said to themselves, “Yeah, this looks finished”. The animation changes styles between episodes. In the first episode, all the characters just look like animals but are made of basic shapes. In the latter three episodes, they attached the voice actors human faces to the animal or plant character models and they are scary looking. Because they couldn’t properly animate facial expressions, they stretch and blow up their faces and body parts in all different directions and proportions to convey emotions.
The background and scenery are bland. Most of the characters lack any texture. The one character that’s a flower in the “Fishtales” episode doesn’t even have individual petals, it’s all just one mold that makes the flower look like a plate. They updated her design in “The Legend At Gaither’s Pond” episode and made her look more like a flower. Some characters also change appearance slightly in each episode, mostly as an update to their design. All I can say is that going through each episode the animation gets only better. I will be fair and say that the production crew for the show is very small and limited; only two or three people including Benjy Gaither work on the animation for the show. They don’t have the advantage like other companies to put out better animation.
The songs are also just alright. I would not put them on my Spotify playlist, but they’re performed well, which is expected from southern gospel singers. The morals are just morals.
All in all, the Gaithers should have stuck to singing and should never animate anything else ever. So if you want to, maybe watch an episode or two because me explaining it alone doesn’t give you the whole experience of watching it for yourself. You might get a laugh out of how bad it is or you may just sit in your chair with your mouth open in awe, surprise, and disappointment. It’s a strange irony though, a show made by a religious singing group looks like it was made by the devil himself.
