This review is from: Jonny Quest - The Complete First Season (DVD)
The year was 1964. While the nation's top scientists were preparing to send a manned rocket to the moon for the first time, another nasty little rocket had just made an impact crater in President Kennedy's head, sending the nation into trauma, and setting the stage for a decade of violent (and non-violent) social upheaval. Goldfinger had just come out, creating a James Bond feeding frenzy in the media, spawning compulsive imitation of the spy genre around all around the globe, and most especially on American television.
Into this Cold war environment, Jonny Quest came blasting onto the ABC network in primetime in 1964. If one examines the series closely, it is evident that the Bondian seeds of Jonny Quest came not from Goldfinger but from the earlier James Bond incarnation, Dr. No. At any rate, JQ is a rich example of how to create a James Bond-style action adventure story -- sans the sexy girls -- that fits into a 26 minute time slot, while, in the Hanna-Barbera style of limited animation, using as few drawings as possible. Thus Jonny Quest endures the irony of describing as much action as possible with as few drawings as possible. Aside from it's exciting stories and likeable characters, this is the great charm of Jonny Quest: Maximum action and soundtrack, minimum drawings.
There are countless "scene jumps" to avoid cumbersome character movement. And if any non-cycling action is depicted, such as characters fighting or struggling, it never lasts for more than 3 seconds at a stretch. Because the "locations" from all across the world were drawings and painted backgrounds, Jonny Quest could go "convincingly" to places that a live action show could not afford -- even underwater.
The directorial and story style focuses on efficiency and directness, with dialogue frequently "up front", spelling out feelings and character motivation with blunt force -- there's little time for subtlety. Still, the short time slot makes the stories even more impactful, cramming a great deal of action into 26 minutes.
Quest pioneered a unique, hybrid-anthropomorphic look in character design, which dovetailed perfectly with it's taking the battle between science and superstition into a cultural fetish at the cartoon level. Starting out with one of the finest action-oriented show opens ever created, Jonny Quest broke new ground in the quality of it's stories and it's music.
The show's primary ideology is pro-science, pro-American, and Cold War-centric through cultural innuendo (without being specific about politics), and is a mixture of cultural inquisitiveness, cultural prejudice, and a certain lack of environmental awareness that reflects American values -- or at least network television's values -- in the early 60's. Indeed, Dr. Benton Quest seems to be at the very heart of the military-industrial complex, devising weapons for the military and running his own, sprawling laboratory complex (as in "Robot Spy".) It was the perfect recruiting tool to enlist boys of the sixties into the military -- or at least getting a job with General Dynamics.
In this decade, the scientist was king, so it was not really audacious to create a cartoon series with a scientist as the main character. Another endearing aspect to fans is that Jonny Quest has more "pre-censorship" violence, more violence than would be permissible or "appropriate" today, even on prime-time cable. Later in the decade of the 60's, the Federal Government, led by President Johnson on the heels of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, exerted pressure on the networks through it's influential licensing arm, the FCC, to cut back on television violence.
Being an action-adventure show, the purpose of the violence is not to provoke laughs as in a typical Hanna Barbera cartoon, but it is a "serious" matter, consistent with mainstream comic book violence of the period; although the simplified cartoon style does permit the killing at times to veer into a humorous vein.
It's also worth noting that when Hanna Barbera tried unsuccessfully to recreate the Jonny Quest series in the late 1970's, it proved to be such a difficult task that it bankrupted the company and made a forced sale necessary.
