oung Jonny Quest (Matthieson), age 10 or 11 (sources differ), leads a life of globetrotting adventure. Jonny lives on Palm Key, off the Florida coast, with his father, brilliant scientist Dr. Benton Quest (alternately Stephenson and Messick), former government agent and bodyguard Roger "Race" Bannon (Road), his adopted Indian brother Hadji (Bravo) and dog Bandit (Messick).
Dr. Quest's various research projects and secret government missions take the group around the world and pit them against everything from spies to prehistoric dinosaurs. Individual episodes take Jonny to places like the arctic ("Arctic Splashdown"), Egypt ("The Curse of Anubis") and Nepal ("Monster in the Monastery"). His foes include agents out to steal an anti-gravity device ("The House of Seven Gargoyles"), a Nazi war criminal ("Shadow of the Condor"), an invisible energy creature ("The Invisible Monster"), gold smugglers ("The Werewolf of the Timberland") and mutated giant lizards ("Dragons of Ashida"). Fortunately, between Dr. Quest's super-science gadgets, Race's judo skills, Hadji's magic tricks and Jonny's raw courage, the group is well prepared for anything a life of pulp adventure can throw at them.
This four-disc set includes 26 half-hour episodes, although actual running time without commercials is closer to 25 minutes. The set purports to be "season one" of the show, but in fact includes all the episodes of "classic" Jonny Quest. The so-called "second season" was produced for syndication some 20 years later and doesn't fit well with the original show's tone or continuity.
The set comes in a slipcased folder decorated with stills and original art. The first three discs include seven episodes each, with the remaining five episodes and extras on disc four. Each episode offers Spanish-language audio along with English, Spanish and French subtitles. Notably there is no chapterization—each episode is a single track. Extras include a featurette on the show's place in animation history, a repeated episode ("Double Danger") with overlaid text notes and a "video handbook" of collected clips on characters, locations, enemies, gadgets, etc. There's also a commercial, which was aired alongside the show in 1964, demonstrating that Jonny and Race can do the things they do because of their PF Flyer sneakers.
Once the coolest thing on TV
Ask anyone who was a 10-year-old boy in 1964—or during any of the show's later reruns—and they'll confirm that Jonny Quest was absolutely the coolest thing on television. At a time when TV animation meant goofy cartoon art and comedy, Jonny Quest offered a realistic style and action-adventure stories that combined a pulp sensibility straight out of the 1940s with the Cold War espionage and gadgetry of James Bond. Jonny Quest had guns—and people actually got shot with them. It had jetpacks and submarines. It had monsters—and people actually got eaten by them. And what young boy wouldn't want to be Jonny? He had a dad who took him all around the world and made amazing gadgets. Instead of schoolteachers, Jonny had a secret-agent tutor. And his best friend could work magic. Cool? Nothing even came close.
Sadly, Jonny's adventures haven't aged well, in either sense of the word. While the show's art design was innovative, the animation is rather crude. And let's just say that Jonny Quest's portrayal of other cultures isn't exactly sensitive, even after a bit of editing in "Pursuit of the Po-Ho." Hadji is portrayed as brave and competent, but even he comes off as a bit of a stereotype. And the rest of the world seems to be populated by stock Oriental villains, Soviet-bloc thugs and superstitious natives who speak gibberish.
Plus, while it was a perfect fantasy for young boys, Jonny Quest doesn't hold up so well for adults. The whole world seems too carefully formed into Jonny's ideal Neverland. One example: In all 26 episodes there are a grand total of six women to be seen—including villagers. The storytelling also suffers from an obsession with Bandit, who's endlessly interacting with the local wildlife for comic relief, or else doing something dumb that moves the plot forward by forcing Jonny and Hadji to rescue him.
The included extras are rather perfunctory, the best being the interviews with major present-day animators who were influenced by the show. But, even with its faults, Jonny Quest remains the perfect nostalgic blast for conjuring up the 10-year-old boy within us all.
