Kids like to laugh. Kids like a bit of adventure, too. That’s why Jonny Quest turned out to be such a success.
You’d think that a TV show that lasted one season was a failure. Maybe in live action it is. But Hanna-Barbera took three cancelled cartoon series—Top Cat, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest—and made them into hits. They were put into front of kids' eyes over and over in reruns and all were eventually re-booted (an all-new Quest series appeared in 1986).
Jonny Quest was filled with humans (and a comic-relief dog) involved in adventure and suspense. Kids ate up this kind of stuff in comic books and the Sunday colour comic pages. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera knew what their staff could do. Their studio had artists who had worked on Sleeping Beauty at Disney so they were familiar with animating humans in some form.
Today marks 60 years since The Adventures of Jonny Quest debuted on ABC-TV. Yes, I was among the viewers even though I had no interest in high adventure shows. But this was a cartoon, so I watched.
Was it Walt Disney who said the key to success in animation is story, story and story? Quest—for my eight-year-old eyes and ears, anyway—had great stories. You wanted to see what happened next. And Jonny had maturity. Television was filled with kids who were "precocious" jerks or goody-goodies. Jonny was capable of thinking and standing on his own in tight situations.
Oh, did I mention the eyeball walking on spider legs?
Way back in the early days of the blog, we reprinted this fine feature story from the Levittown Times a few weeks before the series debuted. Here is a little shorter one from the Anaheim Bulletin, Sept. 12, 1964. As it is unbylined and appeared in various newspapers, I presume it is an ABC press release.
‘Jonny Quest’ To Fill High Adventure Void
Joe Barbera, the ebullient half of the creative animation team of Hanna-Barbera, believes their new half-hour series ABC-TV’s “Jonny Quest” will fill a recent void in entertainment.“We haven’t had anything where kids can identify with high adventure,” he pointed out. “Jonny Quest is escapism, the stuff of which dreams are made. It’s Tom Swift, the Rover Boys and Jack Armstrong all rolled into one.”
The series is the most unusual and ambitious undertaking at the ink factory that has produced the likes of “The Flintstones,” “Yogi Bear” and “Huckleberry Hound.” It employs 350 artists and costs a third again as much as the firm’s other shows.
The principal difference is in technique. Barbera refers to “Quest” as staged illustration rather than a cartoon style.
“It’s a brand new style for TV,” he added. “Every master shot is a work of art.”
Barbera said the program takes its principals, 11-year-old Jonny, son of an American scientist and international trouble-shooter and his young Hindu companion, Hadji, on an imaginative adventures in a different world-wide locale every week. “There is lots of action,” he said, “and we use the Douglas Fairbanks approach, where in the villains are disposed of in a flamboyant virtually comedy style.
Extensive research safeguards accurate representation of the ethnic and topographic qualities of the areas depicted, Barbara said. This gives a soft-sell educational aspect to the series.
“That is a happy by-product,” he went on. “Our primary target is entertainment.”
Watching and listening to Barbera effuse about the program is an experience in itself.
A swarthy, handsome ex-New Yorker who began his career as an accountant with a bent for drawing, he moves swiftly about his large, tastefully appointed office grabbing for multi-pictured storyboards, character studies or research material to punctuate each point.Barbera plays all the parts. And he can recite the plots of every one of the 26 episodes without stumbling once.
His partner, quiet, analytical Bill Hanna, a one-time structural engineer from New Mexico, lets the fiery Barbera make the spiels. Both are casual dressers. They don’t believe in reams of inter-office memos. Thus, the atmosphere about their new three-story, $1 ¼-million studio bespeaks quiet efficiency under the burden of a staggering workload.
With the addition of “Jonny Quest,” Hanna-Barbera have 13 TV properties being viewed by 300-million people in 42 countries, plus a feature length film, their first, entitled “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear.”
Hanna-Barbera’s eventual layout chief, Iwao Takamoto, explained the genesis of Jonny Quest in his autobiography. Doug Wildey had been hired to find a way to animate the old kids’ radio serial Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Then Joe Barbera changed his mind. Why not go for something with a little more action, like Milt Caniff’s Sunday newspaper comic Terry and the Pirates?
To quote from Iwao:
“Jonny Quest” was an example of how sophisticated planned animation had become, particularly in the hands of an incredibly clever layout man like Bill Perez. Bill and another artist named Tony Sgroi were exceptional at figuring out how to reuse drawings without making it look like they were being repeated, by “fielding” them, or presenting them in camera range, in different ways. Between the two of them, they used every bit of the trickery that went into planned animation in the first place and came up with a few new tricks of their own. This way they were able to keep their episodes within the budget, which was already high for an animated television show. Some of the other artists, particularly the ones from the comic-book field, who were not accustomed to the techniques of planned animation, tended to run rampant with the budgets, and the costs of these episodes skyrocketed.
Many people have asked why such a great show lasted only one season, and the reason is very simple: it just cost too damned much to continue to do it at the same level of quality. Money proved to be the thing that accomplished what “Dr. Zin” and all of the show’s other villains could not do, which was stop Jonny Quest. When Bill Hanna estimated the price tag for a second season, the network simply said no thanks. Perhaps that is just as well, because that one season of “Jonny Quest,” I feel is a highlight of the studio’s history.
There was another factor Iwao omits. The Flintstones was being crushed under a boulder of higher ratings by The Munsters over at CBS. ABC reacted by moving the Modern Stone Age Family into the Quest time slot to get the numbers needed to ensure renewal for another season (and enable Hanna-Barbera to sell more Flintstones merchandise). Quest moved opposite The Munsters. Cancellation followed. After a bit of a break, Jonny Quest’s old episodes surfaced on Saturday morning re-runs in the 1967-68 season, finding an eager audience.
Bill Hanna once said the prime time run of Quest pushed the studio in a direction which put Space Ghost, The Herculoids and The Fantastic 4 on Saturday mornings. The series certainly should be considered, the Fleischer Superman shorts notwithstanding, the father of action-adventure cartoon shows in North America.
We can't let a post on Jonny Quest go by without referring to the theme song, and composer Hoyt Curtin's desire to make it so complicated for trombonists, there was no way they could play it. The mood library he (and others) created for the series is a true masterpiece. Here are two versions of the opening theme.
Curtin composed another "theme" for Jonny Quest, one that sounds right out of the James Bond movie Dr. No. It can be heard on the H-B Records album Jonny Quest in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. You can hear it by clicking below.
I had thought Greg Ehrbar, who knows more about H-B Records than anyone alive, profiled this album, but I guess not. But Greg has done Hanna-Barbera fans a great service and tracked down Jonny himself. He interviewed Tim Matheson about playing the boy adventurer and you can listen it here.