This stop-motion recreation of the Jonny Quest opening is amazing.

Jonny Quest Opening Titles from Roger D. Evans on Vimeo.

The original version was great to begin with and Roger D. Evans’s loving tribute captures everything wonderful about it while playing to the strengths of the medium he’s working in. The characters, movements, and backgrounds are all reproduced with meticulous attention to detail, from the menacing walking eye to the slow, shambling gait of the mummy to Race Bannon’s flying kick as he rescues Jonny from a bad guy. But the three dimensional sets allow Evans to move the camera around and break free of the profile shots of characters moving straight across the screen that were necessary in a series that relied on cycles and limited animation.

Evans doesn’t own the rights to Jonny Quest. If Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner – who do own the rights – are smart, they’ll either commission him to do some work for them or make a deal to run the stop-motion intro on their spinoff channel Boomerang, which has been running mostly the same interstitial material since its debut. But unless this happens, Evans has no way of making money off of his labor of love, the making of which he shares on his website. Does that mean that this project, while a great treat for fans of the series and free publicity for the show, was a waste of time for Evans and his crew? Not at all. Animating someone else’s characters as a personal project can have great rewards.

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