Episode Reviewed: Inside the Studio (501)

Written and Assembled by: Nathan Hoobler

Production Engineer: Jonathan Crowe

Original Airdate: 11/23/02

Rating (Out of 5 cones):

 

Inside the Studio Episode Summary: Celebrating 15 years of Adventures in Odyssey, this episode tells the "behind the scenes" story of the actors recording the program.   Theme: A look at what goes on in the Odyssey studio, including actor interviews.

As a special, Inside the Studio was very enlightening. This episode aired in a time when 4-5 months of AIO re-runs were on the air, and Inside the Studio was there to help celebrate 25 years of Odyssey.

As a fan, I was obviously interested and excited to hear this episode. Knowing behind-the-scenes information makes me feel like I know more about the AIO team, and I do! I greatly appreciated this episode more than 500 because 500 was a flop (in my opinion at least - too kid-centered and cheesy - read my review of it if you want to know my thoughts on it). After hearing "500" I was nervous as to how AIO would deal with Inside the Studio.

It was cool to find out that Townsend Coleman (the voice of Jason Whittaker) played the 7-UP dot way back when. Man, he is good at that voice! At the end of Inside the Studio it was neat to hear one of the songs sung by Hal Smith and Will Ryan. They were pretty good for just messing around! I was mad, however, when Chris interrupted their singing to wrap up the show.

This episode had lots of interesting tidbits of information, and I was generally pleased with how it was set up. It's always good to hear bloopers and practices (which we heard, including Corey Burton trying to figure out his Shakespeare voice, and other actors too), but I wasn't very happy with how few bloopers they actually showed. Fans always love to be able to hear some of the mess-ups since they're such big fans of the show.

All in all, Inside the Studio is a very satisfying episode. Just take out the infernal laughing at the beginning theme (yes, that was Chuck Bolte if you were wondering) and we'd have a perfect Inside the Studio episode!

I give Inside the Studio 4 and 1/2 out of 5 cones. This episode was well-planned, and the sound design was very good.

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