The Imagination Station episodes

[Bob]

A while ago, I began to wonder at the possibility that, except for a few certain cases, most of the Imagination Station adventures really don't help tell the story that much. Note that I'm not talking about the ones where the purpose was specifically to get the child character to experience the environment, like the original Imagination Station episode, or Lincoln, I'm talking about the ones where the Imagination Station is primarily used as a device to retell the original story.

In particular, I'm thinking of Elijah (the two-parter), although I'm sure you could probably apply a lot of this to other things.

Odyssey (especially classic Odyssey, which is what I'm referring to in this case) has two areas where they can be really good, if they put their mind to it -- first of all, they have a strong cast of child characters that they can use to serve as protagonists in a variety of stories. With kids like Jimmy Barclay, Jack Davis, Robyn (and later Melanie) Jacobs, and Lucy Cunningham-Schultz, you can tell pretty much any story you want without a whole lot of trouble. Slice of life is easy to do with the solid cast they have.

Secondly, Adventures in Odyssey has always written great historical episodes. From the very first one up to the present, in 2010, it's hard to find an episode that retells history (whether Bible or modern) that's a bad episode.

I wonder, though, if merging these two isn't really as good an idea as it seemed like at the time.

The juvenile characters, with their painful, consistent use of modern slang, and complete misunderstanding of ancient customs, often just get in the way of the story. There are some cases, like Back to Bethlehem, where this works; in Elijah, and several other episodes, like St. Paul: The Man from Tarsus, it doesn't. Parley Baer delivered an extremely powerful performance as the prophet Elijah and doesn't need any kid characters to steal the spotlight...maybe it adds a little more impact to him when he's there, if you don't hear him all the time, but I still would rather have had the episode be almost entirely centered around Elijah than have the modern characters and the unrelated side plots (like, where is Robyn/Jack).

The St. Paul two-parter is another example of a story that's carried almost entirely by the real people, and doesn't need the modern ones at all to do it; in fact, it would have been better if they weren't there. The scene where Stephen the Martyr is murdered, for instance, is very powerful as it is, but I can't help but suspect it would be even better if we didn't have Rodney Rathbone cackling in the background.

Of course, in the past few years, the Odyssey team seems to have largely abandoned the use of the Imagination Station, and have come to prefer pure story-telling -- as in "The Jubilee Singers", so this is largely a moot point now. I think this is probably the best way to go.

What do you think, though? Do you think the modern characters really did add something to those old episodes, or was the Imagination Station plot device unnecessarily used?

[Leonard Meltsner]

I think that possibly it creates a perspective on the comparison of what are lives are like compared to ancient times, although I suppose that said example would certainly not need to be applied so many times. I definitely found it interesting that all of the children were prone to complain, whine, and disobey kings and nobles, often landing them in jail, until Kelly, who got water immediately upon request from Pilate, due to her background with her alcoholic mother, needing to be in charge and listen, no questions asked. This contrast in "The Imagination Station, Revisited" against in particular "Elijah", was always an interesting insight, I thought.