Turner Broadcasting System’s Adult Swim plays a rather crude, but often hilarious claymation called Moral Orel. Moral Orel is a creation of Dino Stamatopoulos. As described on their site, “Orel is an eleven-year-old boy who loves church. His unbridled enthusiasm for piousness and his misinterpretation of religious morals often lead to disastrous results, including self-mutilation and crack addiction. No matter how much trouble he gets into, his reverence always keeps him cheery.”
But Moral Orel is so much more than a show about a boy who gets into a little situational trouble. It is one of the best commentaries on what the world sees when they look at Christianity – especially American Christianity. Of course the creator does not claim to be a Christian which is unfortunate, not only for him, but also because the Christian community at large will completely ignore this spot-on commentary (and hilarious content – for those of us who are not easily offended).
Here is a clip from season 2, the episode titled The Lord’s Prayer. At the beginning of the episode Orel finds out he is getting new neighbors. The new neighbors are an almost exact duplicate to Orel’s family, except for two things. The first different is that they have a daughter – who happens to be Orel’s age and has Orel’s zeal for Christ; she plays his love interest in this episode. And the second difference is seen in this clip:
What do you think? Has Stamatopoulos made an accurate observation? I think so.
My family watched this video together… it was a wonderful bonding moment until we disagreed over which version of the Lord’s Prayer was correct: tresspasses or debts. It was evenly split between the men and the women in the family. We think the divorce will be amicable, since two of us are Christians.
-Alan