Johnson and Friends is an Australian children’s television program that originally aired on ABC from 3 September 1990 to 10 July 1997.
Ron teamed up with director Ian Munro to bring this idea to life, and after cycling through many writers, they found John Patterson - who impressed them immediately with his trial script.
Film Australia's technique involved a large oversized bedroom set, and adult actors in full body puppet costumes.
This also marked the beginning of many successful international sales including to the BBC in the United Kingdom, RTP in Portugal and Stöð 2 in Iceland, among many others.
These songs were later used in the TV series and "The Diesel Rap" became a popular children's hit, featuring on more than six ABC compilation releases.
Budding director David Ogilvy, who is now a successful drama producer and writer, was brought on to assist Ian Munro with the shoot, when he was required back in Australia.
[3] Several stage shows based on Johnson and Friends began touring around Australia, utilising Chris Neal's songs, voiceovers of the cast and the real television costumes.
Fox paid the full budget for this series and as such had a lot of creative control, though, they left John Patterson and Ian Munro to do their craft, and not much was changed from their original concepts.
Compilation releases · ABC For Kids - Favourites (100532) 10 March 1997 - The Birthday Balloon Special Releases · ABC For Kids - Video Hits Volume 2 (12985) 21 September 1992 - The Diesel Rap In 1992, Jay Rayvid and Donna Mitroff of WQED, Pittsburgh (the PBS affiliate known for producing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood) entered into an agreement with Film Australia to attempt to get the series onto television in the United States, specifically PBS.
Unfortunately, they were not able to secure funding from PBS to produce a pilot due to the sheer traffic and amount of submissions, despite their interest.
However, the FOX network executives believed that the Australian accents in Johnson and Friends would confuse American viewers, so the series was dubbed over by local Pittsburgh actors.
It was decided that Peter Browne would be retained as Alfred's voice actor, but due to master recording issues, all of his dialogue had to be rerecorded.
Several additional songs and music tracks were written by Chris Neal and his son Braedy, who had previously composed all of the music for the original version of Johnson and Friends, as FOX felt that some of the earlier episodes were "too quiet" and did not fit the atmosphere they wanted for the series.
Minor cuts were also occasionally made along with adjustments to John Patterson's scripts, by WQED executive Casey Brown, to remove Australian terminology and slang.
Series director Ian Munro maintained a level of creative control over the American version of the program and was involved with voice direction for this run of episodes.
These episodes were also shown in Australia, dubbed by the original voice cast and marketed as the fourth series of the program, two years after production, in 1997.