1964 ABC Fall Preview

ABC showed a four-minute clip from "Jonny Quest" during its 1964 Fall Preview show on Sept. 13, 1964, just five days before the pilot, "Mystery of the Lizard Men," debuted.

View the clip in Real Video. If it won't play directly, you can right-click on the link and save the file to your hard drive. Here are some Real Video 10 encodings in ZIP files: low and high resolution.

The preview show also included clips from "Bewitched," "The Addams Family," "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" and other shows that premiered or returned that season.

The "Jonny Quest" clip is interesting from a fan's perspective because there are differences between them and the final version that aired on Sept. 18.

The most obvious differences are in the audio, which doesn't have Mike Road's voice for Race Bannon in the second half and doesn't have Don Messick's Bandit.

Our consulting voice expert, Jeff Adcock, says this, "Race sounds like Marvin Miller to me, doing one of his higher-pitched voices, similar to some toy commercials I've heard him VO." Kent Steine, a friend of Doug Wildey's and a fellow artist, said Doug told him that Joe Barbera performed the Bandit part for the pilot (because he didn't want to pay someone to go, "Arf, arf") and the part was given to Don Messick afterward. The Bandit barks on the broadcast version of Lizard Men are obviously Don Messick's, so I'm betting that we're hearing Joe Barbera's otherwise "lost" performance as Bandit on the Fall Preview.

Jonny's lines as he's being held down by the Lizard Men were also re-recorded.

Video differences include a number of reshoots, including the pictures you see below. There's an extra second of video in the preview while Jonny waits for Bandit to swim to the hydrafoil. Also, as Bandit jumps from the ship, the Lizard Men don't follow him down immediately.

The preview featured a Vue-Com communicator that is much plainer-looking than the one broadcast later that week.

The background and foreground elements for the Lizard Men's ship were retouched for broadcast with more seaweed painted on. The water backgrounds also had more seaweed added.

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