Someone did us the great pleasure of posting the entire sixth season of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER on line just recently. (Transfers from TVLand Broadcasts) Why is this good news for fans of the original JONNY QUEST?Because in Season 6, back in 1963, fresh from doing the voice of Jonny Quest for all twenty-six episodes, young Tim Matheson went on to appear as Beaver's buddy, Mike Hanson, on two episodes of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER.
Here is a short clip of young Tim on a Beaver episode, sounding more like Jonny than we've ever heard him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei6JR4vwqic
After all the great feedback from posting the Quest documentary, and kind of catching the Jonny Quest bug again, hearing from all of you about your like-minded love affair with the Quest party from the 60's, it made me toy with an idea I have been scratching my head about for a long time.
I have read fan fiction for Jonny Quest, and while some of it is great, I wish it had that great, Doug Wildey artwork to go with it. And someone told me I should write my own Jonny Quest fan fiction and then illustrate it.
Problem is, I am no artist. And I'm not sure even anyone today could deliver Jonny Quest in the style those original episodes had, combining the talents of greats like Wildey, Alex Toth and others.Then I thought, what if I used the original artwork from the episodes to illustrate my own story? With the use of Photoshop, I started a very meticulous process of seeing what that might look like.
It is SO time consuming, I don't know when I would have time to create an actual comic book this way -- but I did experiment with one panel. I share it here with my fellow Quest fans:
If more time opens up and I can get a whole story up and running I will post the panels in this blog. It is not only finding the right artwork from the original episodes, but finding original backgrounds for the character artwork to go on top of, is the added challenge to an already huge one.Telling a story with someone else's pictures is a challenge indeed -- but one of my faults (or strengths) is that I do love a challenge.
I am not going to talk much about the Jonny Quest movie that Warner Bros. may or may not be mounting.
Friends I have in the motion picture industry tell me, that with the failure of the uber expensive SPEED RACER movie and some other recent TV Cartoon and Comic Book incarnations, like WATCHMEN becoming titanic, economic disasters on the big screen, the Quest flick rumored to be starring Zack Efron (too old for the orignal twelve year old Jonny Quest) and The Rock as Race Bannon (Race was more than a body. And not a bodybuilder either)
This misguided Quest movie, making the crucial error of paying no attention whatsoever to the babyboomers who would actually go see it -- us, seems to have been derailed for the time being.
In limbo, my movie friend told me, like so many other projects in what has become the tailspin the movie industry is experiencing right now with the financial collapse of so many industries worldwide.
Since the original idea of the 1963 Quest series was being abandoned for this new feature film, it didn't really hold much interest for me, or, dare I say, fans of the true classic Jonny Quest.Maybe when next it comes up on studio slates, it will be something we can all get excited about.
Be well,
From the sands of the beaches at Palm Key,
Chris
