Larry the Cucumber

* VeggieTales
* LarryBoy

Depends on the episode

### Friends

Bob the Tomato, Junior Asparagus, Archibald Asparagus, Mr. Lunt, Jimmy and Jerry Gourd

### Behavioral alignment

Good

**Larry the Cucumber** is a green cucumber who partners with his best friend Bob as the wacky companion hosting the videos. In the pre-2015 theme song, he plays a sousaphone while Bob and other characters sing it. Larry is often cast as the central character in videos with one of his central roles is as the host of the short, recurring musical segment entitled *Silly Songs with Larry*, in which Larry performs humorous musical numbers of various styles and content. The Silly Song segment, typically placed in the middle of the video, immediately became a very popular staple of *VeggieTales* entertainment. Larry also has several other recurring roles including: "Minnesota Cuke" (a parody of *Indiana Jones*); "Elliot"/"Buccaneer Larry", one of The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything; and the comical "superhero" LarryBoy in both computer-animated and traditionally animated adventures. Larry was also the star of his own short-lived animated series, 2002's Larryboy: The Cartoon Adventures.

Larry was first used by Vischer to make a short film called "Mr. Cuke's Screen Test" in 1991 and this film inspired Vischer and Mike Nawrocki to create VeggieTales. Larry's on-screen debut was in Big Idea's first video, *Where's God When I'm S-Scared?* In this first episode, he was the source of most of the jokes, including physical gags and silly dialogue. The video also featured the first Silly Song in which Larry wore an oversized cowboy hat and sang "The Water Buffalo Song." Larry is the only character to have made an appearance in every single VeggieTales episode (to date).

One of the most notable differences between the Larry of *Where's God When I'm S-Scared?* and more recent videos is the range of his voice. While Nawrocki has always performed Larry's voice, early shows were voiced with a broad vocal range, from Nawrocki's natural tenor to well above. Starting with *Are You My Neighbor?*, that range was limited in scope to the upper range and included a slight lisp, giving Larry a more youthful and sillier sound. Gradually, Larry's speech became more normal, at about the time of the making of the video *King George and the Ducky*.

Larry is one of the only Veggies to have spoken about and to have been seen with his family. He talks about his Aunt Ruth in *Dave and the Giant Pickle's* Silly Song, "I Love My Lips" and about a cousin in *Josh and the Big Wall's* Silly Song, "Song of the Cebu". In *Duke and the Great Pie War*, he introduces his three brothers, named Bob, Mark, and Steve, who perform the "What We Have Learned" song.

## Trivia

* In VeggieTales Promo: Take 38, Larry's original voice would later be used for Scallion 2's newer voice (which sounds like Jean Claude Pea without the French accent). When Where's God When I'm S-Scared? was produced, he had a lower dopey type of voice. He eventually got his voice higher after the first two episodes beginning with Are You My Neighbor?. The lower dopey voice was inspired by an old puppet named Soupy that Mike Nawrocki used when he was studying in the puppet ministry at Bible college.
* He is the only character to appear in every VeggieTales project and Big Idea production in general.
* A running gag in the series is other characters mistake him as being a pickle. Thus, he often responds, "I'm not a pickle, I'm a cucumber!"
* Larry had a lisp until Lyle the Kindly Viking. He wouldn't get it back until The Lost Tooth, though this is because of him missing his tooth. According to Mike Nawrocki in the audio commentary for Where's God When I'm S-Scared?, he just got tired of the lisp and went to speech therapy for a while and got rid of the lisp.
* According to the official Jonah website, if he weren't an actor, he would've been a world champion at Candy Land.
* Before Phil Vischer came up with Larry as a cucumber, he was going to make him a candy bar. But in the making of making the model, Phil's wife Lisa came in and looked at the image and told him that parents are going to be mad if he makes the kids fall in love with candy bars. So he changed the candy bar to a cucumber.
* He was at one point going to be called Kooky, but Phil Vischer thought that was too cute and he wanted to use bland names.