Backing up to the 90s, lately, I've been reading up on the production shitstorm that was The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, particularly two interviews on fansite Questfan, one with
Lance Falk and another with
Peter Lawrence. Each worked on a separate incarnation of the show (Lawrence on Season 1, Falk on Season 2), and each one throws some rather pointed jabs at the other for how they handled their respective episodes. For the record, Lawrence and his partner Takashi Masunaga openly hate the original Jonny Quest from the 60s and took the job to make it "less shit", which to them meant going for what they felt was realism. Falk, on the other hand, is an OG JQ fan and, while Lawrence and Takashi were making their version, pushed for something more along those lines before finally getting his wish when Davis Doi and Larry Houston made what became known as Season 2.
The issues the show went through are probably too numerous to go into here, but for the sake of comparison, I'll just give a TL;DR of what each had to say:
- Lance Falk had wanted to work on the show from the beginning, but quickly realized that his love and passion for the 60s Jonny Quest wasn't welcome under Lawrence and Takashi. After an unsuccessful attempt at pitching a retool to get the show out of the quickly deepening issues, he basically said "fuck this" and moved to Warner Bros. to do prop design until, as he recalls, Lawrence and Takashi were booted for spending two and a half years burning $11 million on what turned out to be product of unacceptable quality to Hanna Barbera. Producers Cos Anziolatti and John Eng were called in to make 26 watchable episodes out of the bits and pieces that their predecessors had managed to finish, while Doi and Houston were given the greenlight to make 26 Jonny Quest episodes out of whole cloth, redesigning the characters, replacing most of the voices, and bringing the stories more in line with classic Quest, and it was these episodes that Falk worked on.
- Peter Lawrence, for his part, denies any wrongdoing in the production issues (even debating a claim that Dick Sebast was hired first, claiming the two were hired together), instead passing the blame to HB's executives, particularly Fred Seibert (who he trashes as "a truly pathetic and self-adoring executive") and Sherry Gunther (who he apparently had such a hard time with that he accused anyone remotely willing to defend her as being paid off or otherwise friendly with her). Like I said, he regards the 60s Quest episodes as a tone-deaf relic, and really goes after Falk for trying to make his episodes more like those.
Basically, Falk and Lawrence both clearly hate each other's work, even seeming to hate each other at times. I think whomever you agree with may depend on which batch of episodes you prefer. Personally, I've never actually seen a full episode of either run, only small clips, so I don't really have a horse in the fight.
