Classic Television - Sunday Mornings

Davey and Goliath

Starring

Dick Beals

Norma MacMillan

Hal Smith

Nancy Wible

Ginny Tyler

Davey and Goliath is a 1960s stop-motion animated children's Christian television series. The programs, produced by the Lutheran Church in America (now a part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), were produced by Art Clokey after the success of his Gumby series.

Each 15-minute episode features the adventures of Davey Hansen and his "talking" dog Goliath (although only Davey and the viewer can hear him speak) as they learn the love of God through everyday occurrences. Many of the episodes also feature Davey's parents John and Elaine, his sister Sally, as well as Davey's friends; Jimmy, Teddy, and Nathanial in earlier episodes; Jonathan, Jimmy, Nicky (who looked a lot like Teddy) and Cisco on later ones (all were members of the "Jickets" club).

The introductory music is based on the popular Christian hymn "A Mighty Fortress is Our God", written by Martin Luther around 1529 (in German, "Ein feste Burg").

The show was aimed at a younger audience, and generally dealt with issues such as respect for authority, sharing, and prejudice. Eventually these themes included more serious issues such as racism, death, religious intolerance, and vandalism. In general, the characters found themselves in situations which had to be overcome by placing their faith in God. Davey's friends, Nathanial (in the 1960s episodes) and Jonathan Reed on the 70s episodes, were African-American, and some of the first African-American characters to appear as a friend of a television show's lead character. While Our Gang in the 1930s and 1940s had African American children as friends of lead characters, that was a film series prior to television.

The Davey and Goliath series lasted until 1965 originally, but several holiday 30 minute special episodes were created in the late 1960s. The series resumed with some new characters in 1971 and continued until 1973. In 1975, a final 30-minute summer episode was created. In 2004 Art Clokey's son, Joe, produced a new episode, "Davey and Goliath's Snowboard Christmas." Alison Arngrim, who played the character Nellie Oleson on the television series Little House on the Prairie, has spoken about her very Evangelical parents being involved heavily with the cartoon over the course of its history.

Critics cite the show as tastefully prompting the spiritual curiosity of children, without coming off as preachy.

When the series began airing on religious stations, some episodes were gradually dropped. They included "Polka Dot Tie" (which addresses racism in an indirect way), "On The Line" (due to the scary nature of the episode), "Ten Little Indians" (due to what was interpreted as racism in the word "Indians"), "Man Of The House" (which was controversial due to the children being left home alone at what may be perceived as too young an age), and "The Gang" (due to the violence on this episode). Commercial stations, however, continued running these episodes throughout the 1980s until they dropped the series altogether.

In the early 1990s, those five episodes were officially pulled from syndication and not available to stations regardless of their format (whether religious or secular commercial stations, though very few commercial stations ran it anyway).

"Man Of The House" and "On The Line" have recently been revived and ran on Trinity Broadcasting on beginning in 2006. In the last few years, however, several of the later episodes have been withdrawn due to some behaviors demonstrated on these episodes are considered by some to be "politically incorrect". These episodes are "The Watchdogs" (due to its topic of violent crime), "What's His Name" (due to the nature of threats that Davey makes to take revenge on someone), "Louder Please" (due to Davey's attitude toward handicapped people), and "Help" (because a character came extremely close to a death causing injury), and "Down On The Farm" (one very brief scene has a naked Davey skinny-dipping, and was thought to be too casual a reference to childhood nudity). Additionally "Pilgrim Boy" were withdrawn from television due to negative references to American Indians.