Amazing Jonny Quest Stop Motion Fan Film

Roger Evans has been an enthusiastic low-budget filmmaker for decades, but I know him as the founder of Moviestuff, a company that produces a range of 8mm and 16mm film scanners.

When he's not busy making film capture equipment, Roger relaxes by making movies. His latest work is a stop-motion recreation of the opening title sequence from the classic Jonny Quest (1964) cartoon series.

Above, one of the original shots. Below, Roger's careful recreation:

Best of all, Roger has painstakingly documented the entire process.

He explains: "In 1964, a cartoon show premiered during prime time that would forever change my view of the future. Jonny Quest represented everything a 6 year old boy could possibly imagine. It had action, adventure and exotic locations, all tied together with some of the MOST awesome Hoyt Curtin jazz music ever broadcast on television. As a wide-eyed youth, I looked forward to the day when flying on jet belts would be as casual as riding my bike. But an odd thing happened to this wonderful show. It was canceled after only one season. It was simply too expensive to produce.

But there was another loss, obvious only to kids like me that spent the long, LONG seven days between broadcasts reinacting every scene in every episode using the nearest G.I Joe or Caption Action as a pitiful substitute for Race, Jonny or the others. Sometimes, necessity would require Major Matt Mason to stand-in, despite his puny, sub-1/6th scale stature. Why? Because despite its huge popularity, Jonny Quest was not on the air long enough to spawn a line of action figures. And if you were a kid of the 60's, you HAD to have an action figure from your favorite show.

It always seemed to me that a stop motion version of the opening titles would be killer and that, IF there had been a line of action figures, then that would be the obvious thing to use to live out my childhood dream.

So..... Almost 50 years later, that's exactly what I've done."

Roger Evans' Totally Bitchin' Jonny Quest Pages

In 1964, a cartoon show premiered during prime time that would forever change my view of the future. Jonny Quest represented everything a 6 year old boy could possibly imagine. It had action, adventure and exotic locations, all tied together with some of the MOST awesome Hoyt Curtin jazz music ever broadcast on television. As a wide-eyed youth, I looked forward to the day when flying on jet belts would be as casual as riding my bike. But an odd thing happened to this wonderful show. It was canceled after only one season. It was simply too expensive to produce. The Hanna-Barbera artists were accustomed to producing rubbery, squash and stretch animals and goofy humans. The hyper-realistic pen and ink character designs of series creator Doug Wildey proved to be too much of a task to maintain on a weekly basis.