Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City and Spy Kids, has been tapped to adapt the adventures of Jonny Quest to live-action.
NewsLast year, Robert Rodriguez had his much belated (perhaps too belated) return to Basin City with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Violent, excessive, and lurid, that film caused some controversy among fans and indifference amongst everyone else. So, how do you follow a bacchanalia like that up? By adapting Jonny Quest into a movie, that’s how!
Yes, the director who has spent much of the last decade in the grindhouse, be it Machete or otherwise, is returning to his other passion of family films by taking on the long-gestating Warner Bros. live-action version of Jonny Quest.
As broken by Deadline the four-time Spy Kids filmmaker (as well as Shark Boy and Lava Girl for those with memories for the obscure) signed on to direct the film, which he is also rewriting alongside Pirates of the Caribbean scribe Terry Rossio. The previous draft of the script by Dan Mazeau had recently made the famous Hollywood Black List.
Jonny Quest is of course the classic Hanna-Barbera property that first broke onto groovy television screens in 1964 as a (then) futuristic adventure yarn for the little ones too young to fully enjoy Bondmania. In the series, Jonny and his scientist father jetted around the world for quests (heh) that ran the gamut from espionage to the supernatural. Jonny was also accompanied by a beloved bodyguard named Race Bannon and his best pal, the mildly offensive Indian sidekick Hadji (with of course the loyal family dog Bandit).
Created and designed by Doug Wildey, Jonny Quest ran for only a single year on ABC, but has since lived on in all of our hearts.
Personally though, my favorite iteration (of which there are several) came during my own childhood in 1996 and 1997 with two epic seasons of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, which saw modern updates (for then) of all the character designs, their villains, actual onscreen deaths, the full-time addition of erstwhile Jonny love interest Jesse Bannon, and of course QuestWorld. Oh you don’t remember QuestWorld? The gloriously awful use of rudimentary CGI for some Lawnmower Man styled “virtual reality” cheese? Well enjoy that below in one of the two intros for both series.
