History Characters / AdventuresInOdyssey

* City Mouse: He’s completely inept at nature-based survival in “Flash Flood”.

* OpaqueNerdGlasses: Sports a pair in his official artwork.

!!Joanne Judith Allen (née Woodston)

* NerdGlasses: “A Glass Darkly” reveals that he wears them.

->'''First appearance:''' “An Encounter With Mrs. Hooper”

-->'''Jimmy:'''What are you doing here, Connie? Why are you still here and not back to Odyssey?

* PlayingPictionary: Occurs during an actual game of Pictionary, where she attempts to draw a tank and Marvin keeps guessing that it’s something to do with fish.

* TotallyRadical: Uses the word “radical” a lot in “By Dawn’s Early Light”, and a couple of times in other episodes.

* GreenEyedMonster: She feels that her brother Mark’s fiancée Natalie is trying to steal his attention from her in “Room Enough for Two”.

* BatmanGambit: In "It's All About Me", she tells Jared that she's going to have Mitch fingerprint a note found in her locker telling her that Jared was the one who really pulled a prank on Rodney Rathbone, knowing that Jared will go to her locker and open it to try to get the tape so that she can expose him for intentionally revealing himself and then trying to play it off like a HumbleHero.

-->'''Trent:''' Yes—that you won’t let anyone else ride, Marvin!

* KidsShouldntWatchHorrorFilms: She and Marvin go see a scary movie in "The Mailman Cometh" to try to prove to their mom that they can handle it just as much as their older cousin Xavier can; naturally, they end up scared stiff.

** Whit has to do this for him in “Exactly As Planned” when Tom is charged with blowing up the Novacom tower on his property and can’t remember enough of what happened to him for a not-guilty plea. Tom’s defense attorney, Michael Frazier, decides that the best route would be an insanity plea in which Novacom is exposed, with their criminal actions used as an explanation for why Tom would blow up the tower. Whit investigates the tower instead, and discovers the actual culprit: [[spoiler:Arthur Dent]].

* HollywoodHomely: She repeatedly emphasizes that she’s not one of “the beautiful people” in “Lost By A Nose” and Brenda Frazier scoffs at the idea of her being a contestant in the Young Miss Odyssey contest, but she still makes it to the finals and Nick Mulligan mentions that she’s actually fairly good-looking.

-->'''Trent:''' Yes—that you won’t let anyone else ride, Marvin!

* ItsAllAboutMe: In the episode of the same title, he does his level best to make sure he gets credit for a prank without making it look like he wants the attention, so not only can he be admired for the prank, but he can also pass himself off as a Humble Hero.

* BigBrotherWorship: She’s really close to her brother Mark and looks up to him a lot, which is why it’s hard for her when he comes back with a fiancée she didn’t even know about.

* RememberTheNewGuy: How he’s introduced in “Welcoming Wooton”—not only is he the local mailman, but all the kids already adore him.

* LethalChef: The fire department has apparently responded to the results of her attempts to cook at least nine times.

* EpicFail / BeyondTheImpossible: He was kicked out of NASA for crashing a flight simulator.

-->'''Katrina:''' Because I’m telling you to! And my guess is that considering your obnoxious attitude, I’m probably the only tutor left in Odyssey who will help you get through school!

* SecondHandStorytelling: Of the time he apparently rapped Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy when a boom box was brought to a Shakespeare in the Park.

* SnakeOilSalesman

* DidNotGetTheGirl: It’s a ForegoneConclusion that he doesn’t end up with Jenny—Whit’s future wife—in “The Triangle”.

-->'''Edwin:''' Six weeks of painful rehearsal, two weeks before our performance, and…have you seen what’s been going on in there?---->'''Shakespeare:''' Not on purpose, sir.

* SirSwearsALot: Implied by the Long List of insults that Bart has been known to throw at his customers behind their backs, which Cryin’ Bryan Dern whips out as part of a smear campaign against Bart in “A Cheater Cheated”.

* BookDumb: He doesn’t know that “electric” only has one “l” and that “week” is spelled “weck”.

* EverybodyHatesMathematics/GoodWithNumbers: He’s actually really good at math, as “Think on These Things”, “Potential Possibilities”, and “The Invisible Dog” demonstrate, but he finds it hard to enjoy it when Dr. Hawthorne is breathing down his neck.

* GuileHero/ScienceHero: Tends to fight more with his wits and technological know-how than with physical skill.

* FiveStagesOfGrief/InkblotTest: Tries to push Connie through these in "Eggshells" in the fallout of [[spoiler:her breakup with Mitch]]; in the case of the inkblots, he actually drew them himself in order to enforce her "need" for therapy.

* TheChewToy/HumiliationConga: She really gets put through the mill in “Worst Day Ever”: she crashes into Sarah in the hallway and is late for class, during which she also mixes up a book report that’s due in that same class; she gets a fat lip, causes chaos when the ice machine gives her too much ice, and gets yelled at by a cafeteria worker; she flubs her band audition due to the lip injury; she gets ice cream all over her favorite sweater and an ice show she was looking forward to is canceled; she gets attacked by a dog whose owner blames her, and some unexplained thing happens to her cat.
* ChildProdigy/TeenGenius: Downplayed; while she’s able to take a high school math course while still in middle school and performs quite well, and she’s written a number of plays that have been performed at Whit’s End and on KYDS Radio, she otherwise hasn’t been portrayed as intellectually off the charts.

* MarriedInTheFuture/OfficialCouple: She eventually marries Trent, citing him as someone “very dear” to her as an old woman.

* BigBrotherWorship: She’s really close to her brother Mark and looks up to him a lot, which is why it’s hard for her when he comes back with a fiancée she didn’t even know about.

* TheChewToy/HumiliationConga
* ChildProdigy/TeenGenius: Downplayed; he’s adept enough at school to understand complex mathematical equations and concepts when taught them properly, but he’s never been portrayed as absurdly smart the way Eugene has.

* IntelligenceEqualsIsolation/IJustWantToBeNormal: He really wants to avoid the gifted class in “Potential Possibilities” because he doesn’t want to be separated from normal people.
* MarriedInTheFuture/OfficialCouple: With Mandy.

* EvilIsPetty: Part of the reason why he wants to blow up Whit’s End in “The Final Conflict”—not only will destroying the Underground Railroad tunnel prevent anyone else from finding and using the mineral, but Blackgaard also has a personal vendetta against the mere existence of Whit’s End.

* JerkJock: More in the sense that he’s a bully who also happens to play sports; he plays a number of organized sports, at least at the beginning of his run.

* PutOnABus: Brandon Gilberstadt had to leave to film Series/100DeedsForEddieMcDowd, and his absence was explained by Jared and his family moving away very suddenly; when Gilberstadt was available to take on the role again, Jared was brought back and the sudden move was explained by [[spoiler:his father discovering incriminating information about Andromeda and the family going into the Federal Witness Protection Program]].

* ThePreciousPreciousCar: Well, it’s a bike, but either way, Marvin has a difficult time parting with the one he won in a fundraising contest in “The Nudge”.

-->'''Marvin:''' I have a big hole in my head and I’m wearing dirty clothes!

** Ultimately subverted; in “Welcome Home, Mr. Blackgaard!”, he’s perfectly happy to threaten Edwin—from beyond the grave—with dissolving the trust fund that takes care of her should Edwin refuse his inheritance of the Electric Palace.

** He tries to recite Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy while cold-addled in “The Taming of the Two”. It goes…about as well as you’d expect.

* Because I Said So: Not always keen on explaining his plans...at least, not to Connie.

!!Phillip Glossman

->'''First appearance:''' “Recollections” (flashback), “The Nemesis, Part 1”
->'''Last appearance:''' “A Capsule Comes to Town”
->'''Voiced by:''' Paul [=McCusker=]

* ArchEnemy: To Tom Riley, with whom Glossman had a rivalry ever since the two were members of the city council together.
* BreakTheHaughty: Every time he loses, but especially in “The Final Conflict” (see VillainousBreakdown).
* TheBusCameBack: Appears in a radio interview in “A Capsule Comes to Town”, twenty-five albums after his last appearance.
* CheatersNeverProsper: The multiple times he’s tried to screw over the town, particularly Tom Riley, have all ended up backfiring.
* DragonAscendant: Subverted; as Dr. Blackgaard’s plans draw to a close, he publicly contemplates running for mayor himself right before he is exposed as a criminal.
* EvilIsPetty: He can never resist taking shots at the protagonists—especially Tom Riley.
* FauxAffablyEvil: His polite manner is always a cover for his haughtiness.
* MeanCharacterNiceActor: Glossman is an oily, corrupt, manipulative, smug politician; Paul McCusker is friendly, moral, and caring.
* MeaningfulName: “Gloss” is a prefix referring to “tongue” or “speech”, and Glossman is a master of manipulative rhetoric.
** “Gloss” also indicates a kind of shininess, and Glossman’s manner is nothing if not oily.
* ObstructiveBureaucrat
* ObviouslyEvil: A recent picture from one of the albums depicts him as a greasy, underhanded weasel—which isn't inaccurate, but in the show, he's almost always outwardly polite and respectable.
* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: The kickstarter to the plot of “Not One of Us” is his resignation in disgrace from the city council after making racist statements against the Japanese.
* PragmaticVillainy: With the territory of being an Obstructive Bureaucrat comes the ability to use the system as a means of accomplishing his own personal ends.
* PutOnABus: The aforementioned resignation was a result of his voice actor, Paul McCusker, taking a job in London; Glossman would later return in the Darkness Before Dawn saga. It’s also explained in-universe that he’s going to work for the Webster Development Firm, which is owned by Regis Blackgaard.
* SmugSnake
* SomeOfMyBestFriendsAreX: In “Not One of Us”, he tries to downplay his racist remarks about the Japanese by claiming that he has close friends who are Japanese.
* VillainWithGoodPublicity
* VillainousBreakdown: In "The Final Conflict", when he realizes he has been publicly implicated by Jellyfish and has no way out, what follows is a good fifteen seconds of stammering and dead air before he dumps everything on his lawyer and ducks out.

* VengeanceFeelsEmpty: Discussed and defied in “Waylaid in the Windy City, Part 2”, where he has Blackgaard at gunpoint begging for his life on his knees and reveals that he was actually using a water gun—he had no intention of wasting his second chance at freedom on Blackgaard and just wanted to feed him a slice of humble pie.

* TheCorruptor: To Lawrence Hodges in “Our Father” and Sam Johnson in “When Bad Isn’t So Good”.

* Because I Said So: Not always keen on explaining his plans...at least, not to Connie.

* BigGood: Unquestionably Odyssey's. One wonders why they even have mayoral elections when the town is basically run from an ice cream shop. (Arthur Dent even mentions in "Opportunity Knocks" that he was told that Whit, not Mayor Faye, is the one who really knows what makes the town tick.)

** Additionally, Whit knows [[spoiler: it isn’t even true because he doesn’t pay Eugene more than Connie; the amount that doesn’t go to her paycheck goes to a trust fund for college that Whit set up for her when she first started working at Whit’s End; turns out, she actually earns slightly more than Eugene does.]]

* CharacterOutlivesActor: Whit was infamously Put On A Bus in the mid-1990s because of Hal Smith's death, with the in-universe explanation that he went on an archaeological expedition in Jerusalem. He returns in "The Search for Whit", voiced by Paul Herlinger, who continued in the role until his 2008 retirement (he died about a year later). Andre Stojka then took over the role and has been voicing the character ever since.

** In “Breaking Point”, he finally relents and hands the blueprints to the Imagination Station to someone else to complete it, but he leaves out some essential parts as a precaution anyway—which turns out to have been a good idea, because the guy working on it stole the plans and inner circuitry.
** He also sets up a final fail-safe to shut down the Imagination Station in “Exit”, one that even Novacom, who used the Station to launch their brainwashing technology worldwide, wouldn’t know how to block—simply the word “Applesauce”.

-->'''Bart Rathbone''' (dressed in ‘60s attire): Great get-up, huh? Aw, they don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

-->'''Whit:''' The dump?

** In “Broken Window”, he has Connie, Mitch, and the kids at Whit’s End put on a trial for who broke the window at the Whit’s End storefront, the three accused being Alex Jefferson, Rodney Rathbone, and Sarah Pratchett. As it turns out, Whit accidentally broke it while sweeping; he had them put on the trial because the kids were all blaming each other without knowing all the facts, and that way, the facts came out.

* GuileHero / ScienceHero: Tends to fight more with his wits and technological know-how than with physical skill.

* LawfulGood: Particularly in contrast to Connie’s Chaotic Good.

* NotAllowedToGrowUp: Or rather, not allowed to grow ''old''. Though it is questionable as to how much time has actually passed in Odyssey, there's no doubt that Whit is perpetually somewhere around his sixties.

** Particularly evident in Connie's case, as Whit was the one who was going to walk her down the aisle in her almost wedding.

* {{Troll}}: He has a bit of a mischievous streak himself—he fools Curt with a hand buzzer in “Pranks for the Memories”, has a good laugh at Bart Rathbone’s expense after Bart sees the consequences for his corner-cutting in “A Rathbone of Contention”, and pretends to trip and fall in order to make a fake curse come true in “The Curse”.

** In “Broken Window”, she resolves the question of who broke the window (Whit, incidentally) simply by looking at where the glass pieces are—on the outside, meaning that the window was broken from the inside.

* DeadpanSnarker: When she isn't The Ditz.

* TheEmpath: Right along with being The Heart, she’s really good at reading people’s emotions and helping them get through tough times.

* SecretKeeper: In “Accidental Dilemma”, where she’s the only one besides Whit who knows that Jason faked his death.

* ShipperOnDeck: Connie is a hopeless romantic; so far, her OTPs include Eugene/Katrina, Wooton/Penny, Jimmy/Lucy (although she seems to have switched to Jack/Lucy upon seeing how much closer Jack is to Lucy than Jimmy), and Trent/Mandy.
* SmallNameBigEgo: Played For Laughs in “A Most Surprising Answer”, where she claims that she was the primary reason why Eugene and Katrina got together at all.

* ActingUnnatural / BadBadActing: Showcased in "The Ties That Bind, Part 12", when Buck requests that he and Katrina not tell Detective Polehaus that Buck was beaten up in McAlister Park. Eugene follows through on this promise by acting as suspicious around Detective Polehaus as he possibly can, with a side helping of I Never Said It Was Poison to round it all off.

* ChildProdigy / TeenGenius: He was a bit of a handful as a kid, but there was no question that he was vastly intelligent all the same. He may have disintegrated a bathtub, but the fact that he was around seven years old and knew how to arrange chemicals from his garage to create a solvent still stands.
* ChocolateOfRomance / FlowersOfRomance: Tries to give both to Katrina in "Naturally, I Assumed..." but it turns out that she's allergic to the flowers and doesn't eat chocolate due to the high sugar content.

* DeadpanSnarker: Often in contrast to Connie's Drama Queen tendencies.

* EasyEvangelism: Averted hard. His conversion to Christianity, while inevitable, was the most well-known conversion arc on the show, and it took him years following his introduction, and a significant amount of soul-searching, to accept Christ.

* FromBadToWorse: In "The Right Choice": he dramatically crashes Katrina's parents' renewal of their vows at an upscale hotel, believing that the wedding was Katrina's; Reality Ensues as she calls him out for his assumption that she would get married without telling him; he continues to demand to talk to her to the point where he hacks into the hotel's computer system to get her room number and almost gets arrested for hacking into the system; he learns that Brandon Teller has asked Katrina to marry him, then desperately travels to her university to plead with her to change her mind; finally, he tries to ask her to marry him, only to be shot down. Fortunately, he learns that he has been very selfish and he and Katrina decide to take their relationship one step at a time, but he definitely trades out the shovel for the oil rig.

* InsufferableGenius: Oh, so very much. He dials it back as part of his Character Development to grow into being a Gentleman and a Scholar.
* JustFineWithoutYou: In “Back to Abnormal”, he struggles with the fact that his absence forced the citizens of Odyssey to move on without him and fill in the gaps he left behind.

* LastNameBasis: With almost everyone. If he uses someone's first name or nickname, it means something significant.

* PhraseCatcher: When he indulges in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and Techno Babble, he is usually met with some variation of “In English, Eugene!”.

* SmartPeopleKnowLatin: He knows phrases in a variety of languages, but tends to use Latin terminology the most often. Justified, since his area of expertise is science, many branches of which tend to use a lot of Latin terminology.

** He doesn’t think that maybe it’s not a good idea to drop beef jerky around in the woods in “Flash Flood”.

* BrownNote: The life-after-death program in the Imagination Station is so beautiful and horrifying to him that he demands that Eugene erase it.

** Whit has to do this for him in “Exactly As Planned” when Tom is charged with blowing up the Novacom tower on his property and can’t remember enough of what happened to him for a not-guilty plea. Tom’s defense attorney, Michael Frazier, decides that the best route would be an insanity plea in which Novacom is exposed, with their criminal actions used as an explanation for why Tom would blow up the tower. Whit investigates the tower instead, and discovers the actual culprit: Arthur Dent.

* FireForgedFriends: With Eugene in “Flash Flood”.

* HeroWithBadPublicity: In Darkness Before Dawn, he is falsely accused of taking campaign donations from Edgebiter, the company that polluted his farm, as a payoff, and is recalled and dragged through the dirt as a result. (Fortunately, this is resolved when the townspeople discover that he was being framed by Regis Blackgaard as a power grab by the latter.)

* ItsPronouncedTroPAY: Arthur Dent insists upon pronouncing his name “BER-nard” instead of “Ber-NARD”.

* RefusalOfTheCall: In “Nova Rising”, he gets a message from AREM, who has already been playing a principle role in questioning Novacom’s presence in town, as he’s quitting Novacom to go back to producing BTV on his own. He ignores it (and tellingly does not appear in any of the Novacom episodes afterward).

* TalksLikeASimile / UnusualEuphemism: Has been known to state that something is "about as interesting as the side of a cereal box" and to tell people to "stuff me with spinach and call me a soufflé" when astonished.

* YouNeedABreathMint: Subverted; he asks Eugene if he has one in “The Final Conflict”, but then explains that he needs it, not Eugene. (It’s because he siphoned all the gas out of the tank of Professor Bovril’s car to prevent a getaway.)

** In recent episodes, as the show focuses on them as a married couple, she's gotten better.

* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: Delivers an epic one to Melissa, the student she has trouble with tutoring in “A Book By Its Cover”:
-->'''Katrina:''' I wanna say first that you’d better never talk to me like that again. I don’t care who you are or how you dress or how old you look—that tantrum of yours was worse than a spoiled two-year-old!

* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: To rival Eugene, though, probably due to her superior social skills, mostly when talking to Eugene.

* WillTheyOrWontThey: With Eugene. To no one’s surprise, They Do; first they get married at her father’s bedside moments before his death, then they have a ceremony for all their loved ones in Odyssey upon their return.

* ChickMagnet: Monica Stone and Tasha Forbes both showed attraction to him, and it's entirely possible that Eugene wasn't lying when he claimed Connie had a crush on him in "Love is in the Air".

* GoodIsNotNice: Upon seeing Rodney Rathbone visiting the hospital, Jason forcefully yanks him into an elevator, shoves him up against a wall, fiercely assures him that he and the Bones of Wrath will be brought to justice, and intimidates him into spilling all the information he knows.

* LikeBrotherAndSister / PlatonicLifePartners: Seems to be set up this way with Connie.

* RedOniBlueOni: The Red to almost everyone else's Blue. His contrast with Jack in particular was part of what leads fans to fondly remember the famous "Jack-and-Jason era" that followed Whit's bus trip.

* DidNotGetTheGirl: It’s a Foregone Conclusion that he doesn’t end up with Jenny—Whit’s future wife—in “The Triangle”.

!!Joanne Judith Allen (née Woodston)

* ButtMonkey: When he’s not part of the conflict, he’s caught in the middle of one; in “The Taming of the Two”, he’s forced to put up with Edwin Blackgaard’s rivalry with Malcolm Lear just to try to get someone to act in commercials for the Electric Palace.
* CharacterizationMarchesOn: In his first appearance, he plays parenting straight and believes that Rodney should be disciplined for stealing Tom’s apples and breaking his fence after Rodney beats up a kid for not paying him a dollar; this is in stark contrast to a man who encourages Rodney’s bullying and plays Sitcom Arch-Nemesis to Tom and Whit.

* VocalEvolution: His is probably the most famous example on the show. His voice actor David Griffin’s voice broke while in the middle of recording, to which all of the writers and directors in the room were stunned into silence. Not wanting to lose Griffin as Jimmy, they kept him on and wrote an episode around him going through puberty in “Coming of Age”.
* WiseGuyAndStraightMan: Straight Man to Lawrence’s Wise Guy.

* BrattyTeenage Daughter

* HeIsNot MyBoyfriend: Immediately corrects the flight attendant who assumes that she and Rodney are together in “Aloha, Oy!, Part 1”.

* TarringAndFeathering: It’s actually molasses and feathers, but he ends up doing this to himself when trying to prank someone else in “Pranks for the Memories”.

* EurekaMoment: Has one in “The Treasure of LeMonde!”; while going over the notes of her piano recital piece in her head, she realizes that the clue about “A deaf cabbage” is referring to musical notes.

* GoldFever: Finds herself swept up in it in “The Treasure of LeMonde!”; the trait is quickly defied when she immediately recognizes that greed is wrong and prays that God will help her replace those thoughts with good things. She retains her excitement about the treasure hunt, but it’s more for curiosity’s sake than for money.
* GoodLawyersGood Clients: It’s revealed in a deleted scene from “The Triangled Web” that she’s a lawyer working pro bono out in California.
* HiddenDepths: According to “The Treasure of LeMonde!”, she plays piano, and it’s established in “The Winning Edge” that she’s a powerhouse softball player.

* NoIndoorVoice: She’s not exactly the quiet one in “The Treasure of LeMonde!”.

* WiseGuyAndStraightMan: Wise Guy to Jimmy’s Straight Man.