Sunday, April 12, 2009

The Circle of Quest

The '60's prime-time animated adventure series JONNY QUEST started life as an attempted adaptation of the radio show JACK ARMSTRONG: ALL-AMERICAN BOY. In look and spirit, it strongly resembled Milton Caniff's comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES. So it's entirely appropriate that although filmmakers developing a live-action adaptation of JQ, starring Zac Ephron as Jonny and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Race Bannon don't want to call the project "Jonny Quest" anymore -- the SPEED RACER live-action movie made studio execs nervous about adaptations of '60's cartoons -- they still want to make the movie, albeit under another title. The cycle of semi-adaptations continues.

****Update*****

Geoff Boucher, the L.A.Times blogger of the fannish, posted this ode to the JQ series a few months ago. It includes a YouTube compilation of scenes from the top 5 episodes. Number one was the episode that stands out most starkly in my childhood memories: "The Invisible Monster." It was notable both for its ingenuity (how do you fight an invisible monster? Throw bags of paint at it, so that it's not invisible any more!) and for the horrifyingly abstract monster, animated in a style different from anything else in the series.

No comments: