DALLAS

The journey there

This last Friday, began one of the most amazing and exciting adventures I’ve experienced in my life: “The Adventures in Odyssey Live show”. The air travel alone would have been exciting enough to make me want to post something on here, but getting to meet and shake the hand of these voices that I’ve grown up listening to was simply awesome.

I’ll skip past the most of my trip to the airport and whatnot, since that’s not really the most interesting part. My favorite part starts right after I landed, so that’s where I’ll begin:

When I arrived in Dallas, for some reason I was expecting a quaint little old west’y type of town with a few horses and some cowboys and stuff… I couldn’t have been more wrong. When we landed, I was astounded to find myself surrounded by hundreds of sky scrapers and stadiums knitted together by this maze they call “the highway”. Never before have I been caught in such a tangled mess of roads so obviously inspired by Italian pasta. It was a preverbal “spaghetti junction”, as my good friend Eugene would say.

After getting hopelessly lost for a couple life times, we finally arrived at the first event of the day at Mardel’s bookstore about 2 hours late. I don’t think we missed too much, since I still got a chance to talk to Will Ryan, and harass the Mr. Whittakker puppet a bit (who actually turned out to be Bob Smithouser). After having a great time meeting and catching up with some friends from Focus on the Family, we decided to go get some rest before the big show the next day.

The next morning around 9 AM, we all began to slowly drift back in to the real world, and out of the state of unconsciousness. The day was christened with the nostalgic listening to of a couple Odyssey episodes, and a few old TCF bloopers that hadn’t ever been shared before. We had a lot of fun with that, too much perhaps, because we almost ended up being late for the show.

The show (article for the Adventures in Odyssey Scoop blog)

June 16^th, 2012 the AIO live show (This article DOES contain spoilers, so be warned!)

When Kevin, his sister and I pulled into the parking lot around 20 minutes before the show was to start, we were surprised to see how incredibly vast the venue was. The church itself was practically the size of a football field crossed with a couple concert halls. We were even more excited to see almost all 3,000 of the seats (in both shows) in the auditorium packed with enthusiastic fans.

The show began with the two hosts we’ve all come to know and love from the Official AIO podcast (Bob Smithouser and Jesse Florea) introducing the show. Considering the idea that the whole thing was a “Birthday Bash” for Odyssey’s 25^th birthday, they decided to kick off the event with a birthday cake, and a larger than life birthday card signed by hundreds of fans.

Soon after the devouring of said cake (which I didn’t get to partake in, unfortunately) Chuck Bolte took the stage and systematically introduced the actors in order of relevance to the show. When all nine actors had arrived on stage, and director Nathn Hoobler gave the signal, the lights went down to begin one of the most entertaining stage events I’ve been to in a long time.

The first scene started out, already flaunting the impressive skill of the production team, with Dave and his son Landon Arnold masterfully operating the miniaturized stage edition of “the foley room”. It was incredible getting to see so much of what goes into making an episode of Odyssey all in real time.

The story seemed normal enough in the beginning; however, as the show went on, the script started to get more and more, well… strange. I was a little confused at first, wondering how they could get away with letting a villain from the captain absolutely comics escape from KYDS radio and begin attacking all sources of art throughout history via the Imagination station. It seemed a little far fetched for Odyssey. After the show got closer to the end, though, I didn’t really care how "out there" the story was, because it gave the cast and crew so many opportunities to show just what the team was capable of.

In a breathtaking (and even more ridiculously silly) finale sequence where the entire town was blown to smithereens by an atomic bomb, I was finally and hilariously reassured that Odyssey was still the same show I’d come to know and love when the line came out of Jess/Wooton’s mouth: “so anyway Mr. Whittaker, that was my dream”. Incredibly cliché, but it had everyone in the entire audience rolling on the floor.

The show was filled to the brim with stunning audio and visual effects and hilarious dialogue. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much at an Odyssey episode in my life (I also never knew Dave Arnold could tap dance!). Everything about the show was as good as I could have imagined it to be, and judging by what I saw of the footage from the last live show, a million times more fantastical. The venue, the acting, the writing, the production, everything about the show was top notch, and really showed the world how talented the team behind the show is, and just how much fun the actors have in the studio.

My only negative comment, and I’m not even really sure it should be considered “negative”, is that the show overall was quite a bit more silly and over the top than you’d normally expect in and Adventures in Odyssey episode. But really, I’m glad it was. It gave the cast and crew so much more of an opportunity to have fun with the episode, and keep the crowd involved.

I guess if I were “rating” it, I’d give it a 9.9/10. (I would have rated it 10/10, but I had to take a point off for the one line Will messed up on. That’s right Mr. Ryan, you can’t just get away with stuff like that. :P)

After the show

In the hours in between and after shows, I was very surprised and excited to see how many fans of The Ceiling fan and the ScoopCast came up to both me and Kevin wanting our autographs and pictures with us. It was such an honor to be there with all these famous actors, and having people recognize US, fans of the show, and wanting to have their pictures with us and stuff. I’ve never really had people recognize me from something I’ve done on the internet before, so I was super excited to have people knowing who I was.

I got plenty of chances to interview lots of fans, and even some of the crew about the show. It was such a blast meeting so many people all at once who are interested in the same things I am. I also met quite a few creative people who also do stuff on the internet. I ran into some really cool guys from Youtube under the username “Blimeycow” who do a show called “Messy Mondays”, you may have seen their video about homeschoolers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJHt-m3VX6o

I’ll add a link a video blog of mine and Kevin’s journey’s as soon as he finishes editing it.