In 1958 Franklin Clark Fry, president of the United Lutheran Church in America, set aside a million dollars for a television program the denomination had not yet designed, aimed at children rather than adults and built around everyday moral lessons rather than doctrine. The church contracted the job to Clokey Productions, the small studio behind the clay animated character Gumby, and the result, Davey and Goliath, first aired February 25, 1961, well after the denomination's own planning had begun but well before anyone could have predicted how long the show would last.
Each fifteen minute episode followed Davey Hansen and his dog Goliath, whose talking only Davey and the television audience could hear, through ordinary childhood situations, a broken window, a schoolyard disagreement, a lost object, resolved through honesty, sharing and consideration for other people rather than through an explicit sermon. The United Lutheran Church in America merged into the newly formed Lutheran Church in America in 1962, and production continued under the merged denomination's sponsorship through most of the following two decades.
The show's reach quickly outgrew its own denominational funding. Syndicated to television stations across the country, Davey and Goliath became a genuinely mainstream piece of American children's television, remembered fondly today by audiences who never set foot in a Lutheran congregation and in many cases never knew one had paid to make it. Production wound down through the later 1970s, with a single one time revival special produced in 2004, but the original episodes have never fully left American television, still turning up in reruns on stations that program classic children's material.