Jonny Quest E1: "The Mystery of the Lizard Men"

This review was once again comissioned by @krinsbez.


Since we're going further back into the Hanna-Barbera annals, I figured a little more historical background might be appropriate. As I mentioned last time, the late sixties weren't a great half-decade for American animation, with Disney, WB, and Hanna-Barbera all kind of just flailing under various financial blunders and copyright fiascos. Like many such funks though, it came on the heels of something of an animation golden age in the late fifties and early sixties.

And, to be fair to Hanna-Barbera Studios in particular, this particular company also played a major role in ending that funk at the start of the seventies when they rolled out the first episode of "Scooby Doo," returning to the place of honor they'd had before it with "Tom & Jerry," "The Flintstones," etc.

"Space Ghost" and its contemporaries were really just a weird, low-effort, low-budget fugue that HB fell under for a few years, in the grand scheme of things.

"Jonny Quest" is an older adventure series from 1964, right at the end of the good stretch. This doesn't necessarily mean it's good, of course, but I at least expect it to be more effortful than the stuff that followed. I haven't seen this series, but as a kid I did see a few episodes of its remake "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest," that came out in the nineties. I remember enjoying what I saw of said remake, so hopefully the original will have something going for it as well.


Future me reporting in! And yep, Jonny Quest is pretty decent. I wouldn't say it's aged well, but there's plenty of stuff to enjoy alongside the lumps, and it absolutely does have the effort and vision behind it that was missing from the later sixties H-B adventure shows.

The premise is a bit of a shaky one, but for a kids' show I think it holds up well enough. Omnidisciplinary scientific genius Dr. Benton Quest is the US Navy Intelligence's special consultant for cracking weird and threatening mysteries. He is accompanied on his investigations by his eleven year old son Jonny, who in turn is accompanied by special agent Roger "Race" Bannon tasked with the boy's education and protection and who Jonny sees as sort of a cool uncle. It's strongly implied that the late Mrs. Quest was killed by enemy agents trying to get at the doctor, explaining both why Dr. Quest refuses to be far away from his son and why said son needs a whole entire Fed to guard him full time. And, of course, Jonny always ends up playing as major a role in solving the mystery as his father does, despite Race's attempts to keep him away from it.

There seem to be some other main characters rounding out the cast, but most of them don't appear in the pilot episode. The only other exception being Jonny's dog, Bandit, who reminds me of that one incredibly cursed episode of Stardust Crusaders.

Speaking of dogs, it's interesting how much this show seems to be a prelude of things to come as it is an evolution of what came before. Jonny, Race, and Bandit poking around at creepy environments full of danger is absolutely "Scooby Doo" seven years before Scooby Doo existed. In the shorter term, the little boy from "The Herculoids" looks and sounds a lot like a lower-budget version of Jonny, and his relationship with his father is very much like a less nuanced, more annoying version of Jonny's relationship with his father.

There's also another proto-Scoobydooism that took me by surprise in this pilot episode. The mystery is initially framed as being about monstrous "lizardmen" that turn out to just be men in costumes. The difference is that in this case, the monster-fakeout is implied to be totally accidental on the part of the bad guys. Terrorists are building a secret base in the Sargasso Sea, and they wear dark green greeble-covered diving suits as camouflage. Thing is, when people DO manage to catch sight of them despite the camo, the bumpy algae-green suits covered in bits of dangling sargasso weed make the terrorists look like some kind of inhuman reptile-men when glimpsed from a distance.

I really wonder if this pilot *specifically* inspired some of the people working on it into making an entire show with the premise "what if other bad guys did something like that *on purpose* in every episode? And also we went for pure comedy instead of adventure-with-some-comedic-elements? And also turned Bandit the dog into the main character?"

"Jonny Quest" has some of the same production value limitations as "Herculoids" etc, but not all of them, and not as badly. The voice acting isn't great, but the extremes of feeling are a liiiittle more convincing at both extremes. There's a lot of stiff animation and "objects sliding across the background instead of properly moving" throughout, but not as often or as brazenly, and it's punctuated by bits of very fluid and effortful animation that makes up for it. Like the way these sea snakes wriggle their bodies across a dingy rusted shipwreck:

That screenshot also reminds me that sometimes there's excellent shadow work, and sometimes there's conspicuously none at all.

I wish the quality of the animation was more consistent, rather than constantly oscillating between "really good" and "nonexistent," as the latter is more than a little distracting. Still, it's much better than being stuck on "nonexistent" all episode long.

The character writing is...not amazing, but good, especially for its time. In particular, Jonny strikes a good balance of precociousness without being annoying (at least usually), and his rapport with Race the spook babysitter is both affectionate and convincing while still leaving room for character conflict. One place where this really shines is in the show's educational bits. There's a recurring thing where Jonny asks questions about things like the history of the Sargasso Sea, what the sargasso weed is, how a hydrofoil boat works, etc. A lot of children's programming fucks this up by either force-interjecting it unnaturally into the dialogue, having the kid ask random or idiotic questions, or turning the adult's answers into a big intrusive monologue. Here though? Jonny asks the questions I'd expect a curious, intelligent 11 year old to ask, at pretty much the pace you'd expect him to, and Race answers them concisely and characterfully without interrupting whatever other thing he'd been in the middle of doing. It's a rare balance, and the show strikes it dead center.

Another perk of this is that *some* of the trivia (in this case, the situational advantages of Judo relative to other martial arts, and the flammable nature of dried sargasso) ends up being relevant to the late-episode action sequence, but not *all* of it does. The show rewards kids for paying attention and learning things without condescending to them by treating the entire episode as a lesson plan and quiz. Watching Jonny use what he's been learning to help beat the bad guys instead of just being a liability for the adults is also a nice difference between this and "Herculoids."

Honestly, the dynamic between Jonny and Race is so strong that Dr. Quest himself is almost extraneous. His own moments with his son are less convincingly family-like.

What I'll probably remember the best about this episode, though, is the atmosphere. Once Jonny and Race stumble into the bad guys and kick off the action sequence things naturally get sillier and slapstickier, but outside of that "The Mystery of the Lizard Men" has a surprisingly effective horrific atmosphere. The way the landscape of depressing, sargasso-entangled shipwrecks is drawn and detailed, with the slow panning and the eerie, uncanny music, eesh. It really sells the trepidation of the good guys going into this investigation, and makes it so that you absolutely believe that the local fishermen would think this place haunted and the men who lurk in it monsters.

Hell, even after the mystery has been revealed and the villains exposed as just some bumbling ex-Soviet agents-turned-terrorists, seeing them glide through the weedy water and clamber up onto the shipwrecks in their rugose green suits is STILL creepy and disturbing. It also helps that the episode intro shows the "lizardmen" just straight up murdering a crew of sympathetically-portrayed Cuban fishermen in cold blood. Even when they're later being knocked around by a boy and his dog in a slapstick action scene, a little bit of that menace is still retained. And even amplified at one point, when they start setting sargasso fields on fire to flush the good guys out while shooting at them with a realistic-looking gun rather than the cartoon lasers that ended up taking their place under later censorship policies.

The villain's plot is typical cartoon villainy. Perfect the experimental laser gun that Ivan never let him finish working on (testing it on old shipwrecks and hapless Cubans as needed), and then use it to shoot down an upcoming American moon-mission just as the rocket is leaving the atmosphere to SHOW THEM ALL. The way he and his henchman go about committing their crimes and protecting their secrets in the meantime is much more mundane, though, and - combined with the incredibly eerie atmosphere - the grittiness and inelegance of them makes them scarier than these halfwitted SatAm baddies would otherwise be.

I don't want to overstate this. Like, ultimately, a wisecracking eleven year old and his pet dog are a match for the baddies. But, within those genre limitations, they manage some surprising menace.

Dr. Quest and his US navy pals tinkering away in the background while Race, Jonny, and Bandit accidentally their way facefirst into the plot do manage to be relevant again by the end, fortunately. I imagine that in other episodes, Jonny's father has a more active role throughout, but here he manages to come into his own in the end by pulling out a special heavy-duty mirror he's been working on ever since he started to suspect the work of laser weapons at the site. The climax has Jonny and Race outmanoeuvring their pursuers until the latter are goaded into breaking out the laser gun and attacking the navy boat itself, at which point the doctor reflects the beam and lets them blow themselves up. Everyone gets to contribute to the resolution, even if some of the characters were frustratingly left to spin their wheels for most of the runtime.

Heh, speaking of spinning wheels, there's also this *charmingly* pointless little flourish involving Dr. Quest's big clunky supercomputer. The episode is bookended by them inputing all their knowledge about the situation into it, waiting ten seconds for the wheels to turn and the lights to flash, and then being wowed when the computer prints off an incredibly, unhelpfully obvious answer.

Lmao.


Anyway, it's janky, but I'd never call this "bad" based on what I saw in the pilot. I can definitely understand why they decided this merited a remake in the nineties.