Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Anyone Here Old Enough To Remember Jonny Quest?

The real one, from 1964...


My brother Steve and I used to watch it every chance we got.  As far as I remember Jonny Quest was just about the only kids cartoon featuring gun battles, aerial dog fights, and explosions in which bad guys, and even a few good guys, were actually killed.  I don't remember if Jonny or Hadji ever did anyone in, but Dr. Quest and the family's bodyguard, Race Bannon, certainly did.  I would have guessed there were more than just 26 episodes and that it ran more than just one season.

Technically JQ was a science fiction adventure program, given that its stories depended on technologies that were not realized at the time (or since).  There were laser weapons, a flying saucer (which delivered a really cool robot spider spy), hydrofoils, undersea crawlers, private supersonic jet transports, hovercraft, fighter jets that looked remarkably like the modern F-16, personal computers, and jetpacks.  Ooh, jetpacks...  There were some monsters too - mummies, pterodactyls, giant lizards, mutant crabs, sea monsters, and energy creatures.  The bad guys were either agents of unnamed hostile governments, mercenaries, or Dr. Quest's old friends who had become mad scientists.  Ah, the 60s...good times.

I must admit I'd forgotten how annoying Jonny's clever bulldog Bandit was, but he's not as grating as Scooby-Doo, Garfield, or Jar Jar Binks.  Oh yeah, there was an inferior version of JQ in the 1980s.  Those are not the shows we're talking about here.  These days you can enjoy this blast from the past by logging on to NetFlix and ordering home delivery for the four disk series.  Ah, the good old days!

1 comment:

  1. Jonny Quest was the best cartoon EVER. Thinking back, this show spawned my interest in science fiction. I've got the series on DVD and have gotten my grandson, Gage, interested although he likes Scooby-Doo just as much if not more. That's okay, I'll continue to watch Jonny Quest with or without him.

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