The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast

Bob: Hello, Odyssey. I'm Bob.

Jesse: And I'm Jesse. Welcome to the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast.

Bob: Jesse, let me ask you a question. Do you have a favorite birthday memory?

Jesse: Actually, just a few months ago was a great birthday. I had the whole family over, the kids and the grandkids. We grilled some steaks, played some games, and it was just really fun to be around family and have a good time. How about you?

Bob: I'm not sure if it's my favorite, but the one that stands out is when I was five or six. I got sick at the last minute, and it was too late to cancel the party, so I spent the afternoon inside my house listening to lots of other kids having fun in the backyard. I learned a valuable lesson, Jesse. Even when it was all about me, it wasn't all about me.

Jesse: That's an interesting memory, Bob. But there are a lot of other people in the midst of a big birthday celebration right now. And boy, are there plenty of birthday memories to look back on with this one.

Bob: The United States is 250 years old this month. We're contributing to the celebration with our two-part Odyssey episode, "The Measure of a Patriot."

Jesse: We'll talk more about that episode and the team that created it in a minute. But first, here's the latest news.

The Blackgaard Chronicles Book 8, "Dark King Dominates," is now available. In this latest novel, Dr. Regis Blackgaard sets his sights on taking over the centerpiece of Odyssey, Whit’s End itself. He uses lies, scandal, and sabotage to get what he wants.

Bob: This book adapts the audio album "Darkness Before Dawn," one of the most pivotal storylines in Adventures in Odyssey history. There are so many classic moments there: the battles between the Bones of Rath and the Israelites, Tom's fight to keep his job as mayor, and of course, Eugene's salvation.

Jesse: I wonder if we learn any more about Lieutenant Shaw.

Bob: Jesse, it's not about you, remember? All right, you can relive all those moments and more that weren't revealed in the audio show in "Dark King Dominates." It's available at the Focus on the Family store. We'll have links on our website.

Jesse: And now, getting back to America's birthday, club members already heard "The Measure of a Patriot," Part 1, last week. This adventure tells the interlocking stories of three different patriots who are critical to America's first birthday and to the very fact that there's an America at all.

Bob: Let's get the inside story of this episode and some hints about Part 2 as we sit down with writer Abigail Geiger and sound designer Zach Schneider. Zach, Abby, great to have you back in the studio again.

Zach Schneider: It's great to be here.

Abigail Geiger: It's good to be here. Thanks for having us.

Bob: Let's dive right into this. This is exciting. Some Adventures in Odyssey episodes are the result of an assignment. Others come from pitches or ideas from the writers. Talk about "The Measure of a Patriot." Where did that one come from, Abby?

Abigail Geiger: This one actually had an interesting start, something that I'm not quite used to. It really started because I was looking into what it would take for me to get a history degree. I love history. I'm a bit of a nerd. I love to learn, and I've always been a little bit disappointed that I didn't go to college.

I started looking into if I can do this on my off-hours. Obviously, you guys in the studio can see I am very pregnant, so that wasn't the most reasonable option at that point. But I had talked to Marshall Younger about it at one point. He came back to me later and was like, "Hey, we've got the 250th anniversary of America coming up. Would you do the show for that?" And of course, I was like, "Absolutely," because that was something that I was very excited to do and to dive into.

Bob: There are hundreds of patriot stories. Why these three? What was it about these that really made you zero in on them, and had you considered others?

Abigail Geiger: We considered a lot of different stories. I think we started off with Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Martin Luther King. I went through a whole list of different ideas.

We really came back to wanting it to be people from the Revolutionary War. We wanted it to be people who were in the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I already had that Benjamin Franklin story in mind. I had read a book about him and I really wanted to do this story, so I held on to that one all the way from the beginning, no matter what changes we ended up making, which were a lot. There were a lot of different changes and a lot of different ideas that went through.

That became the central point for me, the Benjamin Franklin story. After that, it was a side of research that you don't really think about that much, which is looking for stories where you end up reading a lot of different articles. You end up going on a lot of different rabbit trails and trying to find which is the best story here that really touches something in me that I want to tell, that relates to the theme of this central story that I have.

Bob: One of the neat things about the Bible is that it does not whitewash the saints. They're not stained-glass saints. They've got flaws, they've got problems. And yet, sometimes when we look at our patriots, we want to do that in America. You wanted to show the founding fathers as real people with some real challenges and some flaws. In the first draft, there was a question about some of them owning slaves. How did you not only resolve that but then make it part of the story's theme?

Abigail Geiger: For me, that actually was the most important thing right off the bat. That is something that you see so much in today's culture. Either the founding fathers are these brilliant saints who are on these pedestals, or they're the most diabolical villains in history.

It's either good or evil, and people are just not like that. The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But that doesn't mean that someone who has sinned, who has flaws, can't be used by God. That was something that I really based the foundation of this story on and I really fought for because I wanted to show the human side of these people.

God continues to redeem and use people who have significant flaws. For me, it's a cheat to pretend that our founding fathers were so perfect, but it's also revisionist history to try and claim that everything they did had no value because of these flaws that they had.

Jesse: And Abby, this one took longer to write than normal. Why is that? Beyond the fact that, of course, it was a two-parter, why did it take a little more extra effort and extra time to get this one just right?

Abigail Geiger: It definitely did take a lot longer for me. There were a couple of reasons for that. First of all, I was in my first trimester of pregnancy when I was writing this, and those first three months for me are all about survival. I'm on autopilot and just as fast as I can get home and get into bed, that's the best way to do it.

But also, there's just so much more that goes into a history show. There's so much more research and you can't quite get into the flow state with a script in the same way because you have to check what you're putting in. You can't make things up as you go along.

There has to be this double-checking. I had 15 tabs open on my computer that I had open for months to double-check. What were they saying in these moments? What were the specific details of things that were happening because I really wanted to be very accurate? It's a little harder to get into that "I wrote 10 pages today and it was awesome" feeling because I had to check every other line to make sure that what I was saying was accurate.

Jesse: How long did this one take and what's the normal pace in creating a script for a similar two-parter?

Abigail Geiger: For a similar two-parter, it's usually a month and a half, maybe two months. This one took the full three months and I was pushed up against my deadlines every time. I usually am very good about being a week or two ahead of my deadlines and sending things out. This one was more like, "Yep, I'm going to get it. You need it tomorrow at 10:00 AM. It's going to be there at 9:59."

Jesse: Don't worry, Marshall, it'll be done. I promise. Zach, do you have an equivalent? Abby with the 10 or 15 windows open on her computer to get everything just right. Do you have an example of why these historical episodes take longer?

Zach Schneider: For sound designers, it really comes down to the availability of the sounds that we have in our library. Part of that is the environment. If we're in Colorado Springs and if you walk outside, you're going to hear cars driving by. Pretty much anywhere you go because it's the city.

What did they not have in 1770? Cars. Anything we record outside has to find special ambiances that don't have any sort of city noise, that's all very sparse. But then I wanted it to feel like a lot of those places that we visited were cities, both London and then other places in Boston.

We needed to have that busy feel, but it couldn't be the busy feel of today. It had to be the busy feel of 250 years ago. I had to find good horse sounds, horse and carriage, and then cobblestone streets, which we don't have many of those anymore. That kind of thing is what I'm looking for to really fill out my sound palette.

A lot of the other parts of the process were pretty similar, especially dialogue editing and Foley. But it was mainly the sound effects that really were the challenge of trying to find the right ones to make everything work.

Bob: You mentioned the cobblestone streets, and I don't know that we have cobblestone in the Foley room. How did you do some of those practical effects that you need rather than going to a sound effect server that says something about 1700s Boston? What can you do about the buildings and about the different steps and so on?

Zach Schneider: Like Abby, I did a little bit of research into these places that are referenced in the script. I looked at photos of how they are now and pictures of what they used to be like. I tried to gather as much information as I could of what it would have been like to really be there and then made my creative decisions based off of that.

There are certain things you just can't really do, like how many steps it would take to get from the front door to the cockpit, which is one of the places that we go. We had to make that walk in the show, but I couldn't do that exact amount of distance because that's not how long the dialogue was.

You have to make a few concessions here and there for that kind of thing. But I tried to use tile floors where there were tile floors and wood where there was wood. It was pretty subtle stuff, things you wouldn't necessarily think about, but I tried to use even the room size as an indicator for what this would have been like to actually be there. I was just using some of that reference as a creative idea machine.

Jesse: Abby, as a writer myself and one who's written historical fiction stories for Clubhouse, I have to ask about the research because you were looking at different people's lives and digging into them. Was there one person that was maybe easier or harder to find information for? And how do you know when you have enough information? These folks have such rich lives that you could go down that rabbit hole and spend weeks just doing research.

Abigail Geiger: The Benjamin Franklin story was really the easiest for me because I had just finished a big, thick biography on his life. I knew the story I wanted to tell and I had most of the details already set. He was easier.

Then John Adams, of course, is a great person to write about. He was a very prolific writer. If you go to the founders' archives online, they have all of his letters. You can find his diary online, and so he has so much information that he can give you.

Then you get to Caesar Rodney, and he did not write about himself at all. It was very difficult to find information about him and most of the articles that I found had the same basic information. It was a little bit hard to put together a really solid picture of what happened on that ride and what exactly were the details. He reportedly was a very humble person. He didn't talk about himself much. Even when he wrote letters to other people, he wasn't sitting there describing all these things that he did, which John Adams did. He was talking about them and about other people. It was much harder to create a picture of his ride, his life, and his personality.

As to when I know I have done enough research, I have never done enough research. Right up until the moment that we are finalizing the script together in a room, I'm Googling things like, "What is this question that I never even thought about?" I remember the week before sessions, we were going over the script and somebody came up with a question. I don't remember what it was, but it was like, "Wait, let me look that up real quick. We gotta know." It was literally to the last minute.

Then once Marshall says, "Okay, the script is finalized. It is done. We're not making any more changes," I check with him and I'm like, "Are you sure?" And he's like, "Yes." And I close all my windows and that was the end. When Marshall says you can't make any more changes, then I know I've done enough.

Bob: Having all of the information, the research in hand is one decision, but then you also had to decide how you wanted to tell the story because you didn't choose to tell it chronologically. Why is that, and was there a point at which you thought maybe that was the way you were going to go?

Abigail Geiger: Actually, in this case, I think with three different stories, it would have been harder to tell chronologically because just the way the stories flow, you would have had this action rising and falling. You would have had the climax of this story and then kind of the slow beginning of the next one, and it would have messed with the flow of the story.

It made more sense in my brain to put it all together and to let the stories flow naturally through the rising action together. Again, that's a very difficult process to be like, "Okay, which scene are we putting in here now?" We went through that when we worked on "Out of the Spotlight" together with the story of David and Jonathan, but this, of course, we're talking about three different characters trying to weave them all together. You have a real knack for that.

Bob: The Imagination Station as a device, of course, gives you the perfect tool for being able to bounce around a little bit.

Abigail Geiger: Absolutely.

Bob: Well, you've both accomplished something here that you can be really proud of, which brings us to our TRQ. You two know what that is, apparently.

Zach Schneider: Wait, can you remind me? What is it?

Bob: For listeners who don't know, a TRQ is a totally random question from a fan. Famla wants to know, can you remember accomplishing something as a kid that you were really proud of?

Abigail Geiger: Oh, I know. I read "Little Women," the full book of "Little Women." I was very proud of myself because it was so big. I read through the first part of it and it was a very big, chunky book. I was probably 10 or 11, so for me, that was a big deal.

Zach Schneider: Actually, that reminds me of when I first read "The Lord of the Rings," because my parents' rule was you had to read the books before you could watch the movies. I was young enough at that point where the movies had come out and I wanted to watch them, but I couldn't until I read the books. Those were actually some of the first full-length novels I ever read, which they weren't exactly easy. So I was pretty proud of myself for that.

Bob: It's a great sense of accomplishment for having read something that might have been a little intimidating. I think maybe something our listeners can adopt and pick a book this summer.

Jesse: I like it. Thank you, Famla, for your question. Appreciate it. Let's jump into the recording sessions. The scripting's done, everything's ready, you're in California. What do you guys remember the most from that? I heard someone lost a tooth or something, and then there was a battle of hiccups going on there.

Zach Schneider: Both the characters of Wyatt and Sophie are played by actual kids. Dawson, who plays Wyatt, is such a professional young man. But he got the hiccups during the recording session and he felt so bad about it because when you're trying to record your voice, the worst thing in the world is that every five seconds. He felt really bad, but we were like, "It's okay, just drink some water, sit down. We can keep recording when you're better." But he felt really bad.

Abigail Geiger: It was so fun to have the kids in the studio. I wasn't there, I was listening in back in Colorado, but it just brings a different energy when we have little kids in the studio. It was so cute because they were so professional. They're interacting with these adults who are amazing actors who have been doing this for many, many years, and they're being very professional.

Then Emerson, who plays Sophie, just out of nowhere, she goes, "I just have this loose tooth and it's so annoying." It was so cute. She was so much fun to have in the studio. They bring a different energy and a different feel to the show that is supposed to be all about kids. I just love when we've got kids in the studio who are playing actual kids because so many of our kids are just played by adults as they have that youthful voice. But it's just such a treat when we have kids in the studio and they bring a different energy.

Bob: Was there a particular line in the show that each of you stood out for you as a favorite?

Abigail Geiger: Yeah, I have a very favorite line in this script, and it's one that I didn't have to write myself. It's almost a word-for-word quote from John Adams' diary. I think I found a synonym for one of the words so that it would be more understandable for our audience.

It's the line where John Adams says, "This shall be the most gallant, generous, manly, and selfless action of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of work I have ever rendered to my country." It's one of my favorite moments because it really, honestly was very true. It really set a precedent for justice in our country. It was a big deal that he stepped in and did this.

But also, it shows a side of John Adams that really very often frustrated his peers and drew a lot of criticism his way, which is his self-importance. He was very aware that he was being very generous. It made me laugh every time I read it. We have to show this side of him because it made him so human. It took him a little bit off the pedestal that sometimes exists with the founding fathers and it makes him a little bit more relatable and helps us to understand him a little bit more. And it was just funny.

Zach Schneider: I think the kids' reaction to that too, where it was like, "Wow, he got arrogant really fast," was just the perfect reaction. That's also one of my favorite lines from the show. It's just so funny.

Jesse: Zach, you worked with Jared DePasquale in creating the musical score for this episode, and you actually collaborated with him on an instrument that Benjamin Franklin invented. The guy invented everything. First of all, what was the instrument, and how did you work with Jared to create the actual sound from it?

Zach Schneider: If you listen to the show, you will know that Ben Franklin invented the glass armonica, which is not something you see a lot of. It was essentially a device that had a bunch of glass bowls on a rod and you turn the rod and you use your hands to play the glass bowls.

If you don't know how that works, maybe some of you have seen this where you can take your finger and basically run it around the rim of a glass and it'll make this humming sound. Depending on the size of the glass object, it'll actually change the pitch. When he discovered that, he made an entire instrument out of it.

Jared and I, I did a little bit of Foley to kind of get some of that handling sound, getting the thing cranking. I got a few glass dinks here and there to feel like you're actually touching it. And then Jared wrote a piece of music that you hear in the show that is Ben Franklin playing the glass armonica, and he did that with his own set of sounds that he has of actual glass armonicas.

Bob: Looking back, what lessons from this show were the most meaningful to you personally?

Abigail Geiger: I think for me, it was how I look at history and how I want to be able to learn from it without trying to justify or explain away or clean up who these people were. We forget sometimes that there's so much to learn from history without trying to whitewash it a little bit and make it pretty.

We do this with biblical characters. We talked about that on the show with David and Abraham and Moses, and we acknowledge that they had flaws and that they were people that had sinned and fallen short of what God wanted them to be, and yet we're still willing to learn from them.

Then with historical figures, we either toss them aside because they were terrible people or we want to justify who they were and want to forget about the parts that were not as pretty, that were not as easy to reconcile. That for me was a challenge to look at history for what it is and to delve deeper into what was God doing instead of trying to push that this person was so perfect that they can be learned from and I should copy everything about them. No, let's focus on what was God doing here. How was He moving in all of this? Take the focus off of the people, and that was really important to me.

Jesse: Zach, how about for you? Is there anything you applied to your own life? Besides the white powdered wig that you're wearing, which is great, by the way.

Zach Schneider: I thought you'd never notice. No, for me, very similar to Abby, it's the point of the show. So listen to the show. But it's the fact that Paul says in scripture, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ."

There's this aspect of there are people, there are role models that we look up to and we want to be like them. A lot of the times we'll put historical figures like the founding fathers in that category of people to look up to and people to behave like, which I think there's a lot of merit to that and there's definitely some of that to be found in scripture as well.

But ultimately, we're not supposed to be imitating other people; it's Christ we're supposed to be imitating. We should imitate other people as they are like Christ, but really if we want to be more like Jesus, then we should try to be like Him. For me, it's a good reminder of that in this show specifically, that we all have flaws and we have our own problems just like the founding fathers did. But it's most important that when we're setting somebody up on a pedestal, we're doing so for the reasons that they are like Christ and not just because everything they did was exactly what we want to be like.

Bob: Thank you both for sharing about these powerful and timely episodes. It was great to have you guys in the studio today.

Abigail Geiger: It was great to be here.

Jesse: I love how this episode looks at patriotism with both gratitude and humility.

Bob: It's a good reminder that history isn't just about celebrating; it's about learning.

Jesse: I can't wait to hear the conclusion.

Bob: You won't have to wait long, Jess. Part 2 releases in the club tomorrow. Chris, can you give us a preview of that one?

Chris: Now in the Adventures in Odyssey Club, Sophie and Wyatt find themselves caught up in historical events including—

Guest (Female): That was the Boston Massacre!

Chris: And the race to cast the deciding vote for American independence.

Guest (Male): Are you still on your way to Philadelphia?

Guest (Male): Yes! We could be walking for hours in the rain.

Guest (Male): Then we walk for hours in the rain. Independence is at stake!

Chris: The story behind the birth of America, now in the Adventures in Odyssey Club.

Bob: That's all for this edition of the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast, a presentation of Focus on the Family.

Jesse: Visit adventuresinodyssey.com to find out more about "The Measure of a Patriot" or anything else we talked about today. You can also call us at 1-800-A-FAMILY.

Bob: I'm Bob.

Jesse: And I'm Jesse, reminding you that with God in your life, every day is an adventure.