How It Came To Be
The Adventures of Dash and Juno Podcast has been over 5 years in the making. It all started with my son, who was around 4 years old at the time telling me all these ideas for stories he had. He crafted such a level of detail with each story and they were actually quite good for a 4 year old. One rainy day when we had run out of things to keep our two kids entertained, I told him we should make a podcast out of his stories as a way to pass the time. Before I knew it we had created the main characters, Dash and Juno, who are based on my son, Huxley, and my daughter, Kaiella (who is 3 years younger). At the time she could barely speak, so all her lines in the podcast, were generally, words like , “yea” or “whoa!”. Even getting Huxley to record lines at age 4 was difficult, but we pressed on and got an episode completed. We loved the process, and continued to write stories for future episodes, but never managed to make anymore podcasts for a long time, and kept the podcast we had made, just to ourselves.
Then COVID happened and we had to shut down our business, and suddenly I had a lot of free time on my hands. We finally had time to dive back into this, and since Huxley was older, he could now handle reading lines, and reciting them much easier. Unfortunately Kaiella was still too young to handle recording her parts, so we reached out to some people and found an awesome “Juno”, voiced by Grace Wiseman. Her dad, Chris, who is in the sound recording industry helped her record her lines, and she did an awesome job!!
Huxley and myself tried to record our own lines, but we couldn’t make it work in my small coat closet, so we went to a local recording studio and they made our audio sound a lot better. Then there was the challenge of figuring out how to use editing software to piece all the audio, sound effects, and music together. Speaking of music, during a bike ride with my wife and Huxley, he brought up that we needed a theme song. Him and my wife, Shannon, started singing different lyrics as we rode bikes, and they both came up with the final version fairly quickly. Again, not really knowing anything about how to record a song that actually would sound good, we found Harrison Nida to help put the lyrics to music. We were so pumped on what he created, he really did a fantastic job. With that, we had our theme song and we had our episodes finalized, which brings us to the present. We are so excited to share these stories with you, and we really hope you like them.
Sincerely,
– Jimmy Sbarra
Cast & Credits
Dash: Huxley Sbarra
Juno: Voiced By Grace Wiseman (based on my daughter Kaiella)
Kitt: Jimmy Sbarra
Mom: Shannon Sbarra
Other Characters: Jimmy and Shannon Sbarra
Recording Help: Central Oregon Recording Studio (Thanks Scott!)
Theme Song: Written by Shannon & Huxley Sbarra, put to music by Harrison Nida
Artwork: Jimmy Sbarra
Stories: Created by Huxley Sbarra and written by Jimmy Sbarra
What’s Next?
Even while developing Season 1, we would keep a list of ideas for future seasons. Huxley and myself have a huge notebook filled with ideas to keep the adventures going. Our thought was to see this podcast project through to finish as a fun father/son activity that would be just for us. But once we had completed it, we figured, why not release it to the public and see if other people enjoy it too? If there becomes enough support and demand, we are ready and excited to create a new season. So if you enjoyed Season 1 of the Adventures of Dash and Juno, you can help us in three ways to ensure a second season:
- Leave a review on itunes, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Share the podcast on social media and tell your friends about us 🙂
- Buy the Season 1 Printable Coloring Book or other gifts. This helps us to be able to pay for studio time, web hosting, podcast hosting, and all the other expenses that pile up when creating a podcast. By purchasing a coloring book, you will help us to be able to afford to create a Season 2!
