The first deaths are the little babies sent up the river. Now you might think, “Little kids watching this won’t think those babies are gonna die!” If you watch the scene and listen to how Mr. Lunt responds to what Mr. Nezzer is telling him to do you’ll feel how dark this moment is. Watching little bassinets floating up a river is not something people want to see.
The second death scene is when Larry hits one of his brothers with a dodgeball for bullying an Israelite. This brother is knocked off a cliff and falls into the river where he seemingly survives but he is never seen in this movie again.
The third death is easily the most harrowing. Some key information: Mr. Nezzer has a new baby grandson that we see him playing with much earlier in the movie. Nearer to the end of the film after rejecting Larry and Archibald’s request to let their people go it’s time for the tenth plague.
Instead of placing blood on the doorframe to save the life of the firstborn child like in the original story the VeggieTales twist is life preservers on the door. You might be thinking, “That’s a silly twist!” But what happens next isn’t.
The river rises to the point that it floods the town and the babies in bassinets float out the houses and down the middle of the town. The narration makes this seem even more horrible but especially when he says, “All of the firstborn boys were taken…by the river.”
Archibald tells Larry that the Mayor wants to see them and we get a shot of Mr. Nezzer staring at the empty rocker his grandchild was in earlier while he tells them to leave.
As mentioned earlier we do see Nezzer and his posse being heavily affected by the heat of the sun and though we don’t see them die we can infer that they don’t make it back to safety.
Death in a kids cartoon isn’t new, but infant death is a little much; especially on this scale. Is that why this is so forgotten? Possibly. Maybe this movie wasn’t promoted as much as the others. This movie didn’t a have a Silly Song that makes people’s top ten. Maybe it fell smack dab between two heavy hitters so it didn’t get to shine. Or it just might the overwhelming amount of death that just surrounded this movie with bad vibes. We may never know. But this movie certainly isn’t well remembered.
