#60-Adventures in Odyssey

Okay, going into this post I fully admit the possibility that roughly only 10% of the audience may know/remember what Adventures in Odyssey was (to the rest I apologize, and ask you to continue on to post #59).

The Adventures in Odyssey was born out of the brain of James Dobson & his Focus on the Family group (see post #42). Essentially it was a Christian-themed radio series (made into a television series at one point) that focused on tales of calamity and adventures at "Whit's End" which was an ice cream parlor that Whit, an old man, would constantly be inviting a little boy and his dog to help overcome difficulties from bad guys and what not.

Typical Stuff for a children's program.

Except, my family was one of the rebellious families growing up that allowed television in the house.

So when it came time to go to a friend's house in church who was more Christian and thus had no TV to watch, the main form of entertainment outside of having a house that smelled like potpourri was to listen to the radio...

And my friend's preferred program of leisure listening was the Adventures of Odyssey. Needless to say for a kid who grew up watching Mark Summers having kids run in a giant obstacle of madness in Double Dare on Nickelodeon, I was not impressed by a talking box spewing out words of nonsense. I was more miserable than a misogynist in San Francisco (Although you must understand that I did not have an imagination whatsoever as a child so it was even worse for a radio to have me imagine a story in my mind without even pictures to accompany the effect) .

Be it as it may, I would go to church to find myself, the sinner, totally lost without a conversational base amongst my friends many a Sundays because they had Adventures of Odyssey in common. All I had going for me was that I was the house to go to to secretly watch MTV and movies that had fart jokes .

But alas, there was a savior...It was when Adventures in Odyssey released a cartoon series on video to accompany the radio program...And now I could enjoy the visual elements of the otherwise intolerable radio program with the approval of my friend's parents everywhere.

As for the show, it was alright. It was cool because they didn't preach to you, but yet the message was definitely one of a moral character...

However the animation was pretty basic, and if I had to watch a Christian television show, I would have preferred McGee & Me (future post) because within that show you had the incarnation of the world of animation (McGee) manifested in the real world itself.