What is up with the kids and characters on Odyssey now? Before the Barclays left and Darkness Before Dawn aired, I basically knew who everyone was and it seemed normal to have whoever come into Whit's End, even if they were a "new" character. But now, not even any of those "new" characters exist (Sam, Courtney, Erica, etc.) and there's no kids there hardly, mainly just Whit, Connie, & Bernard. Many longtime fans, including myself, don't like that our favorite characters have been scraped (Lucy, Barclays, Jacobs, Sam, etc.) and while that may be necessary, it would be nice to be able to get to know these not so familiar characters (Liz - the annoying one, Sarah - ?, and who else is really there right now?). The only new characters that I feel are really there as a staple is Aubrey and her family. Why were ALL of the old characters, except for Connie, Whit, Bernard, and Tom, scraped? -Submitted by Jeremy Glass

I feel exactly the way you feel, Jeremy, and I'm sure there are others like us who want to go back to the old days of Adventures in Odyssey. To me, none of the new characters are actually "stapled" into the show. Their roots don't appear to sink in very deep and it has affected the way AIO has been in the past few years. Their are several reasons why recent characters have come and gone on the program:

• Actors moved away, and or/came back

• Actors were too busy for Odyssey

• Actors grew up

• Characters grew up

• Characters moved away, and/or came back

Those are basically the minor reasons why characters seem to drop out of the show and get scraped.

 

Now... on to the older characters. Characters such as Lucy, Jimmy, Donna, Erica, Robyn, Jessie, etc. stayed on the show for years and years before AIO decided to drop them. The reason AIO dropped them from the show was because they had been on the show for so long and it just wasn't realistic to keep these "anti-aging" kids on the program. And no... I'm not talking about pimple cream.

 

What amazes me in the more recent episodes is that some characters are introduced in the oddest ways. Wooton, for example, was introduced in such a way that caused me not to like him from the start (Whit trusted him to watch Whit's End in his first show!). Liz was introduced as a snobby little brat. Aubrey herself (although one of the only "staple" characters) was introduced in such a way that made me angry later when they replaced her actress with another. Jared DeWhite, one of my favorite characters, suddenly disappeared from the show. His entrance later was rather melancholy, I believe.

 

It's true that we aren't seeing the current characters as very 3-dimensional. Let's just hope Adventures in Odyssey will come back and start getting to know the characters on a more personal level, otherwise they'll just continue scraping them off the burner.

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