Trivia / Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures

• Acting for Two: Quite a few of the principal voice actors acted for two — or in some cases, three or four — at various times. For example, Frank Welker voiced Dr. Jeremiah Surd and Bandit, as well as several background characters and varying creatures.
• All-Star Cast: In addition to J.D. Roth and Quinton Flynn voicing Jonny for the first and second seasons, respectively, The Real Adventures used some of the best actors and voice actors throughout, including Michael Bell, Robert Patrick, George Segal, Jennifer Hale, Rob Paulsen, John de Lancie, Robert Foxworth, B. J. Ward, Jim Cummings, Clyde Kusatsu and Frank Welker. Michael Benyaer even qualifies having previously voiced Bob in ReBoot.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Robert Foxworth initially auditioned for Dr. Benton Quest for the second season. He would eventually replace Granville van Dusen as Race Bannon for the rest of the season.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Lance Falk hated the Questworld stuff and the Maine compound (hence its destruction in the final episode "The Robot Spies"). As he described seeing how bad the production was early on (see below): "Being at HB and seeing the disintegration of Quest was akin to watching a beloved childhood friend on crack...and I was powerless to help." He also heard "nightmare/disaster" stories from said early production while working elsewhere. And as part of the salvage attempt later on: "it was truly hellish to see it happen."
  • Even Hanna-Barbera's then-president Fred Seibert said of it in a 2003 interview that it almost derailed the October 1996 merger between Turner and Time Warner, and was not willing to go into detail on how many times he'd screwed up in his judgements regarding the project.
• Creator-Chosen Casting: During production of the first season, story editor Peter Lawrence requested an Indian-descended voice actor to play Hadji and Michael Benyaer was eventually cast in the role.
• Creator's Favorite: Writer Lance Falk named Dr. Quest as one of his favorite characters in the series.
• Fake Nationality: The Indian Hadji Singh, as voiced by Canadian-American Michael Benyaer and American Rob Paulsen.
• Follow the Leader: Continuing on from what The New Adventures of Jonny Quest did to the 60s version, the first season did to the 80s version. While still being an action show, Jonny and friends were made more into a realistic 1990s mold. However, the second season deliberately preferred to follow back some elements from the 1960s version. Scooby-Doo would of course also follow on both of those leads as the Scooby-Doo Direct-to-Video Film Series began.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The show had a few single-episode VHS tapes and laserdisc releases during its run, but was all but forgotten after that, especially after the Time Warner merger. Most of the episodes can be found online, though, thanks to the shows' faithful fanbase. Finally in 2009, Turner released a DVD set of the first 13 episodes of season 1, including director/producer commentary and "making of" mini-features. The second half of the first season was released in 2012. The second season followed in November of 2015.
  • As of 2013, the full series is now available for download on iTunes and Google Play.
• Kids' Meal Toy: The series got a set of Pizza Hut action figures to promote its 1996 premiere.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The teasers for "To Bardo and Back" featured Jonny and Jessie fighting some kind of mechanized bull creature. Nothing remotely like this appears in the episode.
• No Dub for You: Unlike the 1960s TV series, The Real Adventures wasn't dubbed into Japanese.
• The Original Darrin: After being replaced by Rob Paulsen for the second season, Michael Benyaer returned to voice Hadji for the Cover-up at Roswell video game.
• The Other Darrin: Due to the different seasons of the show originally being intended to be separate series, as well as the overhaul in production, most of the main cast changed between seasons 1 and 2.
  • Jonny went from being voiced by J.D. Roth to Quinton Flynn, while Hadji went from being voiced by Michael Benyaer to Rob Paulsen (who had previously voiced the character in the '80s telefilms). Jessie was voiced by Jesse Douglas in season 1, but then by Jennifer Hale afterwards.
  • George Segal voiced Dr. Quest during the first season, but was replaced by John de Lancie afterwards. Don Messick actually was going to reprise his role of Dr. Quest, but sadly suffered a stroke during the early voice sessions, necessitating the replacement.
  • Race Bannon was first voiced by Robert Patrick, but then by Granville van Dusen (his '80s series voice actor) for the first two episodes of the second season. Van Dusen was then replaced by Robert Foxworth.
  • The sole exception to these changes was Frank Welker, who provided Bandit's barks and yaps in both versions.
• Out of Order: Due to the chaotic production, both styles of episodes were run in completely random fashion originally, creating a schizophrenic mess that left viewers baffled.
• Parody Assistance: In a way — when recasting for season 2, they used the Freakazoid! segment Toby Danger (an Affectionate Parody of original JQ, complete with Don Messick!) as a vocal reference.
• Playing Against Type: In Season 2, John de Lancie voices the straight-laced, heroic Benton Quest — a role as far removed from Q or Discord as humanly possible.
• Playing with Character Type: "Race Against Danger" has Nick Chinlund voice Greg Temple, Race’s kind mentor who died in a Heroic Sacrifice, only for the episode’s twist ending to reveal that he had actually survived, but gone insane and adopted the identity of a dead arms dealer.
• Production Posse: When Davis Doi and Larry Houston took over production for season 2, they brought in several voice actors who they'd worked with before — Rob Paulsen (from SWAT Kats) and Quinton Flynn (from Fantastic Four).
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Lance Falk and Davis Doi were major fans of the original Jonny Quest, and when they were hired for season 2, they set about changing pretty much everything to make it closer to the original, including de-emphasizing Questworld and changing the voice actors.
  • Jonny's respective voice actors, J.D. Roth and Quinton Flynn, were also fans of the original series.
• Prop Recycling: Some of the vehicles from the Galoob toyline were later recycled in the G.I. Joe toyline in the early 2000s (Hasbro having bought Galoob in 1998).
• Recast as a Regular: Quinton Flynn voiced some minor first season roles before replacing J.D. Roth as Jonny Quest for the next season.
• Recycled Script: The season 2 ep "Eclipse" was cannibalized from an unfinished episode of SWAT Kats, "The Curse of Kataluna" (which would've had a succubus). Not surprising, since Davis Doi, co-producer of season 2 was also a producer of SK; Glenn Leopold, who wrote the ep and a majority of SK eps, also recycled elements for Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.
• Release Date Change: The Real Adventures was originally slated for a 1995 premiere, but was pushed back to August 26, 1996 due to the troubled pre-production.
• Role Reprise:
  • Don Messick attempted to do this, reprising his role as Dr. Benton Quest. This would have made him the only actor from the original 1964 series to return for this one. He recorded lines for at least four episodes, but unfortunately suffered a stroke that forced him into retirement, and passed away soon after. In the final product, he was Darrined by George Segal and John de Lancie (in Season 1 and Season 2 respectively). He did technically reprise the role in an extremely minor sense: In the Season 2 episode "Rock of Rages", when Dr. Quest says "And not a moment too soon!", his voice is Messick's. This line might have been left in as a tribute to the veteran actor.
  • Starting with Season 2, a number of actors reprise their previous roles, although none from the original series. Rob Paulsen reprises Hadji, and Sonny van Dusen returns as Race Bannon for six episodes. They had first voiced these characters in the 80s series.
  • With the exception of Dr. Quest, the second season voice actors as well as Hadji's first season voice actor Michael Benyaer reprised their roles for the Cover-up at Roswell game.
• Running the Asylum: The show's second "season" (in reality an entirely different show that was pitched and then subjected to Canon Welding with the previously established lore) was intended to be a throwback to the original style of classic JQ and written by a group of noted superfans. Lance Falk is even noted in interviews as saying (paraphrased) "Had we gotten a third season, it would have been even more like classic Jonny Quest". Whether this is for the better or not depends on your preferences.
• Troubled Production: The show's pre-production was... turbulent, to say the least. The project started way back in the early 90s, and Lance Falk approached the showrunners, Peter Lawrence and Takashi Masunaga, to work on the show, but left when he realized that the duo was bent on making their own, "reimagined" version as opposed to a closer-to-the-original project, and went to work on another H-B show, SWAT Kats. While there, he heard rumors that the Lawrence/Takashi project was in trouble, and recruited a bunch of other classic JQ fans to assist him in making a pitch to H-B exec Buzz Potamkin, promising that they could get the show done. But Potamkin promptly stonewalled them for some reason, with then studio head Fred Siebert never hearing of Falk's pitch; he and the others were then laid off, with Lance heading to Warner Bros. to work on Animaniacs. Fast forward a while, and the Lawrence/Takashi team had sunk $11 million over 2-and-a-half years and there weren't any episodes ready to air yet. Compound that with the Galoob toys {based around Questworld} being ready to go and Cartoon Network setting airdates, it was clear that the show was sinking fast. Davis Doi (another veteran of SWAT Kats) was recruited to help bring the project back in line and hopefully make something airable out of the chaos. As a result, four different crews were going to work on the show; Cosmo "Cos" Anzilotti and John Eng would handle the task of trying to make sense of the scraps that Lawrence and Takashi made and turn those into episodes (huge amounts of stuff had to be trashed, re-written and animated just to make some kind of sense). Meanwhile, Doi and Larry Houston would be in charge of a new batch of 26 episodes far closer to the 1960s show, with the Questworld gimmick largely phased out, all the voice-actors replaced, and characterization and designs closer to the original. But both batches of episodes were mixed and matched at random when aired, created a disjointed, confusing show. (Both batches were retroactively labeled as "Season 1" and "Season 2" thereafter, though H-B technically saw them as one season.) As a result of the chaos, 13 episodes were cut from the original order and the financial state resulted in the show not getting a third season.
• Two Voices, One Character: In the episode "In the Realm of the Condor", the native boy's screams and cries are done by Frank Welker, but his speaking lines are done by an actual young boy.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Lance Falk's team had pledged to explore the history of Jonny's mother Rachel in a third season, but the show was cancelled so they never got the chance. Their third season also would've seen a further return to the 1960s version, including the complete removal of Questworld.
  • The first season's bible revealed Ezekiel Rage was originally going to be called Argus Grimm.
  • The character of Belle Bonnet was originally going to be the ghost of Belle Starr. Whether or not this would have been a new version of the real outlaw or the 1980s version Hanna-Barbera made for live action wasn't specified in the bible.
• Word of Saint Paul: Jonny's first voice actor, J.D. Roth, definitely supported the Jonny/Jessie relationship.
• Working Title: Despite the many titles given to this show, the most notable is this one Jonny Quest's Extraordinary Adventures.

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