I was re-reading this thread, and I’m quite confident that in “Endangered Love”, the guy hanging out with Barbara Manatee on the TV show was named “Bill”, not “Phil”, and every place I’ve looked online says it’s “Bill” as well. Using “Bill” gives the song more alliteration. I point this out because when I read it on the second page of this thread, I thought the song might be making an allusion to Phil Vischer, one of VeggieTales’s creators. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
In preparation for writing this post, I watched Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki talking about this song on the “King George and the Ducky” commentary and the “Ultimate Silly Song Countdown” behind the scenes. (A Veggie Tales wikia page recommended those sources.) It turns out that the song as originally pitched by Mike Nawrocki was referenced as “Albino Manatee” and was about Larry watching a Cajun cooking show…where the chef was cooking manatee. Phil Vischer anticipated getting letters about a song like that, even if the moral turned out to be “don’t cook manatees”, so he had Mike shelve the song idea and re-work it later.
The verse from the original that Mike quoted:
A glorious mammalian sensation
With a curious lack of pigmentation;
First you scoop them from the river,
Then to serve them up for dinner,
You just sing this little song with me:
Fricassee, Fricassee, Manatee
So in case you were wondering: Yes, there were silly song ideas that were too silly to be made into silly songs.
