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I like Jonny Quest. Man, I love it. It was the only show where there was fightin' and killin' on Saturday morning when I was a younger human. It was reruns in between fishing shows that my local stations replaced actual cartoons with (but I'm not still bitter about it).

Now it's one of the latest cartoons that movie folk rip from the grubby hands of our collective childhood and say they'll turn into a live action blockbuster.

As movie folk are wont to do, they're offering no further information. Like, when they'll do this, They said who they had to do it, but they haven't done it yet. Only, they're gonna. Someday. Because the last cartoon they did that with was popular. And by the last one, I mean Transformers, not Underdog.

If I may quote from Superdave on the RevSF boards: "WHO ASKED FOR A LIVE-ACTION JONNY QUEST? Or a live-action Speed Racer? Or a feature-length Beverly Hillbillies? I mean . . . gaaahhhh!"

I have no beef with Hollywood and the lack of original ideas. Original ideas are overrated. If Hollywood stops adapting things, every movie will have Glenn Close's dying daughter. And that concept has no jet-pack-flying teenagers in it at all.

Jonny Quest was neat. Race Bannon was a rolled-up shirt-sleeve platinum-blond kicker of cartoon ass. But now we can pay money and get the actual Quest cartoons on the magical contraption called DVD.

Unfortunately for live-actionizers, the show has already been satirized and modernized: by The Venture Brothers series on Cartoon Network. And all the jokes about the show (Dr. Quest and Race are a couple: tee hee!) were told in a single 11-minute episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney-at-Law.

But those are both fun and funny. We hear from TV guys and comic book guys when they update old stuff; they talk about how much they dig the originals. Sometimes. But we never hear from the movie-industry cash-grabbers until the movie's done and the dog is a real dog and he makes a sick little boy feel better and . . .

Hey, let's do a dream cast for the Jonny Quest movie!

Jonny: Some guy we've never heard of.

Benton Quest: Some guy we've never heard of.

Race Bannon: Some guy we've never heard of.

Hadji: Some guy we've never heard of.

Bandit: Some dog we've never heard of.