Latest news with #VeggieTales
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Great American Pure Flix Launches The Ark Club, a Safe New Streaming Destination for Kids and Families
New Original Series Iggy and Mr. Kirk Headlines Faith-Filled Summer Lineup Featuring VeggieTales, Bob the Builder, and The Wiggles. NEW YORK, June 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Just in time for summer break, Great American Pure Flix is proud to announce the launch of The Ark Club, a new streaming destination for kids and families seeking trusted, values-driven entertainment. Launching June 2, The Ark Club instantly turns Great American Pure Flix into a reliable home for wholesome children's programming. Headlining the launch is the all-new original series Iggy and Mr. Kirk, a delightful live-action and animated blend starring Kirk Cameron, Leigh-Allyn Baker, and featuring John Kennedy as the voice of Iggy the Iguana. The heartwarming series delivers fun, faith, and life lessons the whole family can enjoy. The Ark Club also features a growing library of beloved favorites including VeggieTales, The Wiggles, Bob the Builder, and more. "The Ark Club is a bold new step in children's entertainment that is safe, inspiring, and rooted in timeless values," said Bill Abbott, President & CEO of Great American Media. "Whether it's summer break, after-school time, or family weekends, kids and parents deserve content that's fun, meaningful, and trustworthy, and all in one place." Whether it is for after-school fun, summer break, or family time on weekends, The Ark Club offers an engaging and enriching experience for kids of all ages. For more information, MEDIA CONTACTS:Pam SlayNetwork Program Publicity & Talent Relations818.415.3784pamslay@ Debbie DavisDdavis@ Media & PR, Director of Client ServicesC: 214-802-8979 (call or text)media@ View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Great American Family
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Art for Everybody' Review: The Hidden Life of the ‘Painter of Light'
One of my high school jobs was stocking shelves and tending the register in a Christian bookstore in upstate New York. 'Bookstore' is a bit of a misnomer: while we did sell books — Bibles, relationship manuals about love languages, 'Left Behind' novels — most of the store's floor space was devoted to things that were not books at all: Christian music CDs and cassette tapes, plus 'gift' items, usually displayed in themed zones: baptisms, amusements and brands like Willow Tree, Precious Moments and Veggie Tales. When I was there in 2001, our biggest sellers came from one section in the store that was set up to resemble a small living room, with a couch and a rug and a wall hanging. This was the Thomas Kinkade section, named for the artist who created the images of colorful homes nestled into sweet landscapes that were then painted and embroidered and printed onto anything a typical Christian bookstore patron might desire. You could buy Thomas Kinkade collectible plates, Thomas Kinkade throw blankets, Thomas Kinkade lamps, Thomas Kinkade crosses, Thomas Kinkade mass-produced cross-stitched Bible covers. With the flick of a button, Thomas Kinkade framed prints would convert images of glowing windows to actual glowing windows via little embedded lights. You could deck your whole life out in Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade, who turned out these original images and called himself the 'Painter of Light,' is the subject of the new documentary 'Art for Everybody,' directed by Miranda Yousef. Kinkade is sort of the Kenny G of American art, ubiquitous and beloved and very easy to deride. The documentary brings in a variety of art critics, journalists and historians to do just that, with reactions ranging from sniffs to an earnest consternation over what Kinkade's anodyne, even retrograde images signify about their buyers. The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, who profiled Kinkade in 2001, provides some background from a decidedly outsider perspective: she hadn't heard of Kinkade in his '80s and '90s heyday, and found him to be as much of an oddity as a cultural phenomenon. But I suspect Orlean is an outlier, and not just because according to the documentary, at one point one in every 20 American households purportedly purchased 'a Kinkade' — meaning a licensed print — to put on the wall, and possibly many more. For those who grew up in and around Christian culture in the United States, especially the evangelical flavor, he was ubiquitous from the 1980s onward, present in church lobbies and grandma's living room. As the art critic Blake Gopnik notes in the film, Kinkade 'fed on the disdain' of critics and the establishment, positioning himself as diametrically opposed to an art world seen as degenerate and anti-family during the 1980s and '90s culture wars. Kinkade served up a vision of a perfect, beautiful world, with himself as a defender (as he says in archival video) of 'family and God and country and beauty.' All of this was very lucrative for Kinkade, who was a marketing genius — one interviewee suggests Warhol might have been jealous — and an outspokenly religious family man. But that makes his death in 2012, at the age of 54, even more startling. After a precipitous decline owing to mounting alcoholism and including public urination, heckling and erratic behavior (plus a failed stint in rehab), Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose. It was easy to write this off as an example of hypocrisy on his part, just another outwardly upright man who kept his real life secret until it burst out of him. But 'Art for Everybody' — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters. Kinkade, they say, was a vibrant and multifaceted man who was forced, partly by his own fame, into showing only one facet of himself in his art: the glowing, bucolic, faith-and-family side. For instance, at various points in the '90s Kinkade's images appeared on the cover of the magazine published by the conservative evangelical organization Focus on the Family, headed by the influential culture warrior James Dobson. Kinkade's branded stores were in shopping malls, and he filmed TV shows that showcased his perfect family, loving life and deep devotion to his Christian faith. The real Kinkade was more complex. The most surprising revelation in 'Art for Everybody' is the existence of what his family calls a 'vault' of his work. Only about 600 of 6,000 have been 'published,' as they put it, as part of the Kinkade brand, but in the vault we glimpse thousands of works that would never hang in a Christian bookstore. They show a far more fascinating artist, one who experiments with forms and styles and frequently depicts the darkness that lurked inside of him. In several images, dark brooding figures rendered in charcoal seem haunted; others feature grotesque caricatures that are bleakly humorous. There's audio tape of him, as a youthful art student, vowing to 'avoid silly and sweet and charming pictures; I want to paint the truth.' Stuffing these impulses down, the film suggests, may explain why he succumbed to addiction. But that art wouldn't have been for everybody, and it couldn't have been marketed to the masses, at least not as work from the 'Painter of Light.' That means that while 'Art for Everybody' unveils plenty about Kinkade's real life versus the fantasy he peddled, it's even more revealing about the nature of art, and what it takes to be financially successful in the mass market. It's not wrong to call Kinkade's art products kitsch: They are sentimental and factory-made, designed to send the viewer into a nostalgic reverie in which critical thinking can simply fade away. The world they represent was distinctly designed for white American Christians who wanted to collect objects that reinforced rather than challenged their faith. (One interviewee notes the conspicuous absence of people of color in Kinkade's cityscapes.) There are questions raised in 'Art for Everybody' that the film lets linger rather than answering directly. What sort of culture requires artists to make themselves brands in order to make a living? The blockbuster success of Kinkade's empire among evangelical Americans is revealing — but of what, exactly? The film prefers to let the audience draw its own conclusions. But it may not be much of a leap to see the glowing windows of Kinkade's cottages and see, as one interviewee does, the blazing flames of a house fire that may burn the whole structure down.
