It’s kind of funny that after 10-20 years of “many famous people throughout history were part of a secret group or organization and had adventures keeping/investigating ancient secrets” stories (Children of the Lamp, Percy Jackson, Assassin’s Creed, Gods of Manhattan, 39 Clues, the Tomorrowland movie, one of those awful Transformers films, etc.) the National Geographic Society, a non-secret group that many famous people from history really have belonged to for 130 years and had adventures working for, made a kids’ book series, Explorer Academy.
And as easy and natural as it would have been to follow the cliches and have some kind of secret revealed about famous explorers of the past… references to them are mostly just shout-outs and namesakes, and the actual mystery at the center of the globe-spanning treasure hunt is… that the main character’s mother invented a regeneration formula a decade ago and a megacorp murdered her for it.
It actually feels way fresher and more original that the mystery and McGuffin aren’t some ancient whatever that the Society has been secretly looking for for more than a century! Instead, it’s very personal to the main character and something that his friends and teachers don’t necessarily know any more about than he does.
