29. On Solid Sound
Why Adventures in Odyssey is an audio drama.
By David Hilder | November 27, 2017
Why Adventures in Odyssey is an audio drama.
By David Hilder | November 27, 2017
If you’ve ever had to explain Adventures in Odyssey to someone, one of the questions that inevitably comes up is this: what is an audio drama? It’s a legitimate question because a lot of people aren’t familiar with the medium. And it has a relatively simple answer. Audio drama is like an animated show without the animation. Like a cartoon it has voice actors, writers, directors, producers, composers, sound designers, etc. And yet audio drama is all sound and no visuals, except album art and maybe some character sketches. So AIO is an audio drama. But a more complicated question is why. Why was Odyssey created as an audio drama? That’s the question this editorial will be exploring.
Adventures in Odyssey is an audio drama with a complex relationship to television. The show’s precursor was a thirteen episode run of a radio drama called Family Portraits which first introduced fans to John Avery Whittaker. When Focus on the Family created Family Portraits in early 1987, the official site notes that Dr. Dobson “hoped that it would appeal to Christians looking for alternatives to Saturday morning cartoons or simply families in search of wholesome entertainment.” Dr. Dobson has long warned parents about exposing their children to violent television programs and video games. Family Portraits was meant to provide a safe entertainment for the whole family. It was so well-received by Christian households that it morphed into a show that’s still going strong after thirty years. But why go back to the medium of radio in an era of television? Why didn’t Adventures in Odyssey begin as a Saturday morning TV show in an attempt to steal viewers away from inappropriate cartoons?
First, there’s the practical answer. Radio is what Focus on the Family was doing a lot of already, and it made sense to add Odyssey onto their growing radio network. Family Portraits even aired during Focus on the Family’s weekly radio broadcasts and were introduced by Dr. Dobson. Audio is also cheaper and less time-consuming to produce than animation or live action. One of the AIO team’s concerns was that they wanted to create Christian drama that was top quality and could compete with what Hollywood was cranking out. Radio was what Focus on the Family specialized in, so they knew they had a better chance creating audio content that was well-produced. But they didn’t go back to the sparse style of Old Time Radio with minimal sound effects. Through the power of cinematic sound design AIO did something new—they immersed listeners in the story as if it was a 3D movie. Through their innovation and creativity, Adventures in Odyssey helped create the genre of modern audio drama.
But there’s another answer to the question of why AIO is an audio drama. In the evangelical community there can be an aversion to the medium of onscreen entertainment. Television, movies, video games and even e-books are seen as less valuable than other forms of media. Heirloom Audio has an online article entitled “5 Reasons Why Your Children Should Probably Never Watch Television Again.” The top reason listed is that TV stifles kids’ imagination. Lamplighter Theatre founder Mark Hamby routinely speaks about how we live in an image-saturated culture which hurts our ability to be creative and imaginative. As much as this rhetoric may sound alarmist, I think it’s largely true. We need to be wary about not only the content we are exposed to, but also the medium. There’s a reason kids find it difficult to concentrate on reading or homework after an hour of onscreen entertainment. There’s a reason you’re suffering from that TV-induced coma. Audio drama provides a wonderful alternative in an age where binge-watching television series has become normal. You get to imagine for yourself what the characters and the setting look life. It’s amazing how subtracting the visuals actually adds to the experience rather than taking away from it.
Adventures in Odyssey comes out of this anti-TV tradition and it’s pretty evident when you listen to the show. Mr. Whittaker famously doesn’t even own a television and warns of its addictive power. Whit says if he owned a TV he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from watching it all the time. In the Twilife Zone episode The Time of Our Lives (Album 27) there’s a skit about a young man who wastes his life watching TV and never does anything in the real world. He says he lives for TV and goes to some extreme lengths to watch it. Similarly, movies are frequently presented in a bad light. When Whit’s grandson Monty comes to town and brings a lot of movies with him (Album 1), Whit says, “There are a lot more things to do around Odyssey than sit in front of the TV.” And when AIO needs to bring up an example of violent or inappropriate media content, movies are usually the target. Kids sneak off to scary movies without parental permission in All the Difference in the World (Album 23) and The Mailman Cometh (Album 41). More recently, Connie runs into conflict with her half-sister Jules about an inappropriate film in Friend or Foe (Album 63).
And video games aren’t seen in a very positive light either, whether it’s Jimmy Barclay squandering all his money on Zapazoids in The Prodigal, Jimmy (Album 4) or Barrett Jones fleeing chores to play Verminoids in Game for a Mystery (Album 51). Jason’s Bible video games are seen as distracting and of no educational value in Red Wagons and Red Flamingos (Album 22). When the episode ended without the games being totally removed from Whit’s End, parents wrote in to voice their concern that video games have no place in Whit’s End to begin with. And of course, who could forget Gloobers (Album 32), in which Dwayne and Jared learn the lesson that when you waste your time playing computer games, you waste your life.
But wait a minute—Adventures in Odyssey produced its own cartoon video series. This is where AIO’s relationship with television gets more complicated. Shortly after AIO began, another series was in the works. In 1989 Focus on the Family launched the show McGee and Me with the help of a financial grant. It was a live action series with an animated character named McGee and over its six-year-run they produced twelve half-hour episodes. McGee and Me was very successful. Not that AIO wasn’t successful, but it’s much easier to market a video series than an audio drama because most people don’t know what audio drama is. You mention audio and they’ll think you’re talking about audiobooks. And so in response to McGee and Me’s success, in 1991 Adventures in Odyssey branched out into cartoons and launched its own video series. With few examples of modern audio drama, television was the default for kids’ entertainment. If an investor was thinking about giving out a grant to produce a new show, chances were they wouldn’t have radio drama in mind. Two years later Veggie Tales launched, followed by Bibleman in 1995. In 2000 came 3-2-1 Penguins, the writers of which included Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer and AIO creator Phil Lollar. Today Christian visual media has largely shifted to feature films, with Veggie Tales being one of the few episode-based shows to survive.
The AIO video series didn’t survive beyond seventeen half-hour installments, but it outlasted McGee and Me’s twelve episodes. There was even an audio AIO episode called Dobson Comes to Town (Album 13) to promote the videos which featured Dr. Dobson as a guest star. Meanwhile, by some coincidence AIO also produced the audio episode A Day in the Life (Album 11) in the same year, in which one of Whit’s stories is turned into a Hollywood movie. The whole episode can be seen as a thinly veiled critique of the video series for simplifying the characters and dumbing everything down in general. Similarly, the episode I Slap Floor (Album 34) also jabs the video series for introducing the Strata-Flyer, Whit’s flying machine. The video series has a lot of problems which I won’t go into now. Suffice it say the videos fail to stand out as original, they take and distort aspects of the audio drama, and overall they lean closer to the mindless entertainment side of the spectrum.
Since the AIO video series ended we’ve entered an era where Christian audio drama is flourishing. Audio drama producers such as Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, Lamplighter Theatre, Heirloom Audio, Jonathan Park, Kids Corner, Augustine Institute Radio Theatre and Iliad House have sprung up. I know of only one audio drama, Paws and Tales, which has made the odd decision to take the sound from their audio episodes and use it as the sound of their new animated video series. Otherwise, many Christian families seem content with audio-only stories. As a side note, I would never want Focus on the Family to take the audio from an AIO episode and reuse it for an animated video. Each Odyssey episode, from the writing to the sound effects, from the acting to the music, is designed to be listened to. You have everything you need to create the scene in your head and the visuals would simply detract from the experience.
Speaking of a visual experience, what about the Imagination Station? Now, people disagree about what the Imagination Station actually does. Does it induce a dream state? Does it actually gain access to a person’s imagination? The machine is clearly an advanced technology, as evidenced by Novacom’s theft of the machine (Album 38). And the U.S. government gets very interested in it when Whit tries to use it to restore Eugene’s memories (Album 44). As much as it appears to be a simple virtual reality technology, it seems to go beyond that somehow. But who knows how it really works. It probably doesn’t induce a dream state because multiple people can step in and experience the same adventure together. And it can’t be wholly reliant on people’s imagination because it has to supply plenty of historically accurate data that the users don’t supply. My guess is that there are plenty of parents out there who love when their kids listen to Imagination Station adventures but would keep their kids far away from the machine if it existed in real life—not only because it's like an advanced video game, but because the machine has blown up multiple times (see Albums 5 and 38). Come to think of it, would parents even let kids visit Whit’s End? After all it’s a hotspot for international espionage and plenty of other dangerous hijinks. Odyssey is not the safest place, and yet it’s so often the place we turn to for safe entertainment. Why include the Imagination Station in an audio drama? My guess is the writers were thinking more about the benefits of imagination than the implications of relying on a machine
In a recent interview writer Nathan Hoobler said, “As years have gone by, many people have said, This in the era of cable TV, of video games, of YouTube — that’s what we should be doing with Adventures in Odyssey! But I think the show creators and Dr. Dobson were right in believing that family audio drama is perennial.” In other words, AIO has tapped into a medium that lasts. Writer Paul McCusker noted that “Because of the rise of mobile devices, it’s given a whole new renaissance to audio. And the ideas that drove us at the start worked in our favor.” Podcasts have become popular these days and audio drama is thriving. But TV and cinema are still dominant. Although it’s easy to label Adventures in Odyssey as coming from an anti-television stream of thought, the reality is more complicated. AIO uses every opportunity to attack TV addiction and the show stands as an objection to TV by its very existence as an audio drama. But at the same time it embraces technology whenever it can be used to further kids’ education.
It turns out Adventures in Odyssey encompasses many different types of media, including audio dramas, videos, novels, devotionals, and even computer games. Yet the videos and computer games are no longer being made. The various book series come and go. And the devotionals can only do so much to develop the characters. The reality is that the audio drama series remains predominant, and it ages a lot better in comparison to visual content. There is no active McGee and Me fan base, for example, maybe because it was geared to younger kids. AIO, however, is still able to attract listeners of all ages. Audio drama seems to have a timeless quality that TV can’t mimic. When Veggie Tales changed its character designs recently there was a big uproar among fans and former fans. Meanwhile, AIO has drastically changed its character artwork many times and it never affects the actual drama. You still have the freedom to imagine Whit, Connie and Eugene however you wish. By practicing what it preaches, Adventures in Odyssey has allowed listeners to use their imagination whenever possible. Odyssey is our show because it relies on us to create the visuals inside our heads. I think that’s one of the many reasons why the show has appealed to so many different people and why the fans continue to clamor for more audio episodes thirty years after its creation.
Adventures in Odyssey is an audio drama with a complex relationship to television. The show’s precursor was a thirteen episode run of a radio drama called Family Portraits which first introduced fans to John Avery Whittaker. When Focus on the Family created Family Portraits in early 1987, the official site notes that Dr. Dobson “hoped that it would appeal to Christians looking for alternatives to Saturday morning cartoons or simply families in search of wholesome entertainment.” Dr. Dobson has long warned parents about exposing their children to violent television programs and video games. Family Portraits was meant to provide a safe entertainment for the whole family. It was so well-received by Christian households that it morphed into a show that’s still going strong after thirty years. But why go back to the medium of radio in an era of television? Why didn’t Adventures in Odyssey begin as a Saturday morning TV show in an attempt to steal viewers away from inappropriate cartoons?
First, there’s the practical answer. Radio is what Focus on the Family was doing a lot of already, and it made sense to add Odyssey onto their growing radio network. Family Portraits even aired during Focus on the Family’s weekly radio broadcasts and were introduced by Dr. Dobson. Audio is also cheaper and less time-consuming to produce than animation or live action. One of the AIO team’s concerns was that they wanted to create Christian drama that was top quality and could compete with what Hollywood was cranking out. Radio was what Focus on the Family specialized in, so they knew they had a better chance creating audio content that was well-produced. But they didn’t go back to the sparse style of Old Time Radio with minimal sound effects. Through the power of cinematic sound design AIO did something new—they immersed listeners in the story as if it was a 3D movie. Through their innovation and creativity, Adventures in Odyssey helped create the genre of modern audio drama.
But there’s another answer to the question of why AIO is an audio drama. In the evangelical community there can be an aversion to the medium of onscreen entertainment. Television, movies, video games and even e-books are seen as less valuable than other forms of media. Heirloom Audio has an online article entitled “5 Reasons Why Your Children Should Probably Never Watch Television Again.” The top reason listed is that TV stifles kids’ imagination. Lamplighter Theatre founder Mark Hamby routinely speaks about how we live in an image-saturated culture which hurts our ability to be creative and imaginative. As much as this rhetoric may sound alarmist, I think it’s largely true. We need to be wary about not only the content we are exposed to, but also the medium. There’s a reason kids find it difficult to concentrate on reading or homework after an hour of onscreen entertainment. There’s a reason you’re suffering from that TV-induced coma. Audio drama provides a wonderful alternative in an age where binge-watching television series has become normal. You get to imagine for yourself what the characters and the setting look life. It’s amazing how subtracting the visuals actually adds to the experience rather than taking away from it.
Adventures in Odyssey comes out of this anti-TV tradition and it’s pretty evident when you listen to the show. Mr. Whittaker famously doesn’t even own a television and warns of its addictive power. Whit says if he owned a TV he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from watching it all the time. In the Twilife Zone episode The Time of Our Lives (Album 27) there’s a skit about a young man who wastes his life watching TV and never does anything in the real world. He says he lives for TV and goes to some extreme lengths to watch it. Similarly, movies are frequently presented in a bad light. When Whit’s grandson Monty comes to town and brings a lot of movies with him (Album 1), Whit says, “There are a lot more things to do around Odyssey than sit in front of the TV.” And when AIO needs to bring up an example of violent or inappropriate media content, movies are usually the target. Kids sneak off to scary movies without parental permission in All the Difference in the World (Album 23) and The Mailman Cometh (Album 41). More recently, Connie runs into conflict with her half-sister Jules about an inappropriate film in Friend or Foe (Album 63).
And video games aren’t seen in a very positive light either, whether it’s Jimmy Barclay squandering all his money on Zapazoids in The Prodigal, Jimmy (Album 4) or Barrett Jones fleeing chores to play Verminoids in Game for a Mystery (Album 51). Jason’s Bible video games are seen as distracting and of no educational value in Red Wagons and Red Flamingos (Album 22). When the episode ended without the games being totally removed from Whit’s End, parents wrote in to voice their concern that video games have no place in Whit’s End to begin with. And of course, who could forget Gloobers (Album 32), in which Dwayne and Jared learn the lesson that when you waste your time playing computer games, you waste your life.
But wait a minute—Adventures in Odyssey produced its own cartoon video series. This is where AIO’s relationship with television gets more complicated. Shortly after AIO began, another series was in the works. In 1989 Focus on the Family launched the show McGee and Me with the help of a financial grant. It was a live action series with an animated character named McGee and over its six-year-run they produced twelve half-hour episodes. McGee and Me was very successful. Not that AIO wasn’t successful, but it’s much easier to market a video series than an audio drama because most people don’t know what audio drama is. You mention audio and they’ll think you’re talking about audiobooks. And so in response to McGee and Me’s success, in 1991 Adventures in Odyssey branched out into cartoons and launched its own video series. With few examples of modern audio drama, television was the default for kids’ entertainment. If an investor was thinking about giving out a grant to produce a new show, chances were they wouldn’t have radio drama in mind. Two years later Veggie Tales launched, followed by Bibleman in 1995. In 2000 came 3-2-1 Penguins, the writers of which included Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer and AIO creator Phil Lollar. Today Christian visual media has largely shifted to feature films, with Veggie Tales being one of the few episode-based shows to survive.
The AIO video series didn’t survive beyond seventeen half-hour installments, but it outlasted McGee and Me’s twelve episodes. There was even an audio AIO episode called Dobson Comes to Town (Album 13) to promote the videos which featured Dr. Dobson as a guest star. Meanwhile, by some coincidence AIO also produced the audio episode A Day in the Life (Album 11) in the same year, in which one of Whit’s stories is turned into a Hollywood movie. The whole episode can be seen as a thinly veiled critique of the video series for simplifying the characters and dumbing everything down in general. Similarly, the episode I Slap Floor (Album 34) also jabs the video series for introducing the Strata-Flyer, Whit’s flying machine. The video series has a lot of problems which I won’t go into now. Suffice it say the videos fail to stand out as original, they take and distort aspects of the audio drama, and overall they lean closer to the mindless entertainment side of the spectrum.
Since the AIO video series ended we’ve entered an era where Christian audio drama is flourishing. Audio drama producers such as Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, Lamplighter Theatre, Heirloom Audio, Jonathan Park, Kids Corner, Augustine Institute Radio Theatre and Iliad House have sprung up. I know of only one audio drama, Paws and Tales, which has made the odd decision to take the sound from their audio episodes and use it as the sound of their new animated video series. Otherwise, many Christian families seem content with audio-only stories. As a side note, I would never want Focus on the Family to take the audio from an AIO episode and reuse it for an animated video. Each Odyssey episode, from the writing to the sound effects, from the acting to the music, is designed to be listened to. You have everything you need to create the scene in your head and the visuals would simply detract from the experience.
Speaking of a visual experience, what about the Imagination Station? Now, people disagree about what the Imagination Station actually does. Does it induce a dream state? Does it actually gain access to a person’s imagination? The machine is clearly an advanced technology, as evidenced by Novacom’s theft of the machine (Album 38). And the U.S. government gets very interested in it when Whit tries to use it to restore Eugene’s memories (Album 44). As much as it appears to be a simple virtual reality technology, it seems to go beyond that somehow. But who knows how it really works. It probably doesn’t induce a dream state because multiple people can step in and experience the same adventure together. And it can’t be wholly reliant on people’s imagination because it has to supply plenty of historically accurate data that the users don’t supply. My guess is that there are plenty of parents out there who love when their kids listen to Imagination Station adventures but would keep their kids far away from the machine if it existed in real life—not only because it's like an advanced video game, but because the machine has blown up multiple times (see Albums 5 and 38). Come to think of it, would parents even let kids visit Whit’s End? After all it’s a hotspot for international espionage and plenty of other dangerous hijinks. Odyssey is not the safest place, and yet it’s so often the place we turn to for safe entertainment. Why include the Imagination Station in an audio drama? My guess is the writers were thinking more about the benefits of imagination than the implications of relying on a machine
In a recent interview writer Nathan Hoobler said, “As years have gone by, many people have said, This in the era of cable TV, of video games, of YouTube — that’s what we should be doing with Adventures in Odyssey! But I think the show creators and Dr. Dobson were right in believing that family audio drama is perennial.” In other words, AIO has tapped into a medium that lasts. Writer Paul McCusker noted that “Because of the rise of mobile devices, it’s given a whole new renaissance to audio. And the ideas that drove us at the start worked in our favor.” Podcasts have become popular these days and audio drama is thriving. But TV and cinema are still dominant. Although it’s easy to label Adventures in Odyssey as coming from an anti-television stream of thought, the reality is more complicated. AIO uses every opportunity to attack TV addiction and the show stands as an objection to TV by its very existence as an audio drama. But at the same time it embraces technology whenever it can be used to further kids’ education.
It turns out Adventures in Odyssey encompasses many different types of media, including audio dramas, videos, novels, devotionals, and even computer games. Yet the videos and computer games are no longer being made. The various book series come and go. And the devotionals can only do so much to develop the characters. The reality is that the audio drama series remains predominant, and it ages a lot better in comparison to visual content. There is no active McGee and Me fan base, for example, maybe because it was geared to younger kids. AIO, however, is still able to attract listeners of all ages. Audio drama seems to have a timeless quality that TV can’t mimic. When Veggie Tales changed its character designs recently there was a big uproar among fans and former fans. Meanwhile, AIO has drastically changed its character artwork many times and it never affects the actual drama. You still have the freedom to imagine Whit, Connie and Eugene however you wish. By practicing what it preaches, Adventures in Odyssey has allowed listeners to use their imagination whenever possible. Odyssey is our show because it relies on us to create the visuals inside our heads. I think that’s one of the many reasons why the show has appealed to so many different people and why the fans continue to clamor for more audio episodes thirty years after its creation.
This site is in no way affiliated with Focus on the Family. "Adventures in Odyssey" is a registered trademark of Focus on the Family.