Cradle Catholics of a certain age will remember a series of animated lives of the saints called Saints and Heroes. Each episode was about a half hour long and featured the story of a saint, or occasionally an edifying or spiritually improving story like Ben-Hur. When I had my own kids, we used to run them on a loop in the minivan when I got sick of hearing Frozen and Tangled (note to automakers: bring back minivans with DVD players and a single drop-down screen). As a lifelong cynic with a slight authority problem, even as a kid I never really cared for Saints and Heroes. The acting was too over-the-top, the animation wasn’t anything special, and the dialogue was corny. Plus, an adult was usually making you watch them. But revisiting them as an adult myself, I appreciated the economical storytelling and the way the series explained to young children the sometimes very abstract message of a particular saint’s life or charism. And quality-wise, I can now admit they weren’t really that different from your average ’90s Saturday morning cartoon.
Anyway, my kids are better people than me, even when they were small, and they were always riveted by Saints and Heroes. No disrespect to the yeoman’s work put in by the Bridgestone Media Group, but I think my kids’ fascination with the series was also a testament to the powerful examples of the saints themselves. But today, as far as lives of the saints are concerned, my family is in something of an in-between phase. Most written versions of the lives of the saints use archaic language or are very old-fashioned. Many of the ones for kids are aimed at very young audiences, and my three kids are decidedly past the Saints and Heroes age: One is firmly in elementary school, one is a preteen, and the oldest is a full-blown teen. I was curious, therefore, whether Chime Travelers—a new animated show based on the series of Catholic children’s books—would have the same appeal.
Chime Travelers follows the adventures of twin siblings Patrick and Katie after a mishap at their younger sister’s baptism. As the one responsible, Patrick has been sentenced to a month of weekend church-cleaning. Rather than drive him to the church only to turn right back around and return to pick him up, Patrick’s dad and Katie hang around and help (this isn’t the kind of kids’ show that has hidden jokes for the parents, but as a parent chauffeur myself, I appreciated the wry realism). While on cleaning duty one Saturday, Patrick discovers that the parish confessional can act as a portal to other times and places. The two episodes that my family watched took Patrick to fourth-century Ireland to meet St. Patrick and whisked Katie to seventeenth-century New York to meet St. Kateri Tekakwitha.
Through the saint’s conversation with Patrick or Katie, they illustrate the saints’ continued relevance to us today.
The framing device begins and ends in the present day, which proves effective in getting older kids interested. In showing Patrick and Katie deal with contemporary and age-appropriate dilemmas at the outset of each episode, the why behind the particular saint’s life is made clear to kids. The stories of St. Patrick or St. Kateri aren’t presented as remote stories from history. Rather, through the saint’s conversation with Patrick or Katie, they illustrate the saints’ continued relevance to us today. At the end of each episode, once the siblings return to their own time, they are able to view and navigate their respective predicaments with eyes of faith.
The dilemmas Patrick and Katie face—friend drama, questions of self-esteem, frustration with parents and family—are relatable to kids, and in both episodes we watched, they were connected thematically with each saint’s life story. Katie’s episode with Kateri Tekakwitha was especially effective in this regard. My kids also appreciated that each sibling gets their own episodes. After the first episode, my middle daughter had just finished saying, “I hope each episode isn’t just about the boy,” when the Katie episode started up. The modern-day characters also do a great job of reflecting the diversity of the Catholic Church in an organic way, so most kids will hopefully recognize their own parish in the community the show portrays.
My younger two—aged nine and ten—laughed at all the jokes. They even weighed in throughout each episode with their opinions about the characters’ choices and their predictions about where the story would go next (if you know my kids, you know this is the ultimate compliment). The animation style is clearly, albeit subtly, anime-influenced, which did not go unnoticed either. My thirteen-year-old is a bit old for it, but as her mother, I certainly recognized some of her own life in Patrick and Katie’s lives.
For those in-between audiences who aren’t quite ready for first-person saintly narratives but are too old for the just-so Saints and Heroes version, Chime Travelers meets the mark.