At Wondercon, Disney pushed its newest “unscripted” content to come to its streaming platform. This one is a revival of 2014’s The Quest. A competition that originally brought twelve adults into a fantasy world of competition. 2022’s Disney Plus version brings together most of the original executive producers to redo this show in a new way with teens.

During the Wondercon panel, Producers Jane Fleming, Mark Ordesky, Elise Doganieri, Rob Eric, and Michael Williams sold the room on the new Quest being a blend of scripted RPG elements with the unpredictable emotions eight teenagers playing through the world of Everrealm will bring.

After the panel, we got to speak with producers to elaborate on what we’ll see. Rob and Michael started with the surface layer of the show, Disney Plus has made a significant investment to create the realm these teens will explore and grow in. Meaning 99% of the show is practical effects with monsters created from head to toe, top-tier production design, and total hand-crafted wear by one of Katy Perry’s key designers. We also learned how much of a difference this is as it was mentioned the original show saved money by using costumes from its locations like the Vienna Opera house.

The decision to cast teenagers versus adults this time was based on, as Elise Doganieri described, “a better cooperative story”. Audiences will not just be seeing a reality show. This show is telling the story of eight teenagers coming together to face the challenges of this fantasy realm. To deepen the immersion, many of the reality show tropes from competitions like The Amazing Race are being avoided such as post-event interviews. These children aren’t acting we’re getting a peek at them reacting and sinking or swimming in this environment together.

We did not get to meet the teens making up this version of The Quest. As Mark mentioned the show has been in the works since before the pandemic and if we saw these kids now they may not be recognizable on our screens.

From what we were shown of Th Quest, the production has a feel of putting non-actors in high-quality Lord Of The Rings-style cinema. Producers were confident that by the end of this run of episodes, we’ll see these teens become characters in Everrealm audiences will be rooting for.

The Quest premiers exclusively on Disney Plus, May 11.