The eternal Quest

A publicity still from the 1986 series, The New Adventures of Jonny Quest. For the uninitiated, that's Dr. Benton Quest, left, Jonny Quest, Bandit, Hadji and Roger "Race" Bannon. (Courtesy of the Classic Jonny Quest website)

When I was in second or third grade, I would get up at 5:30 a.m., race to the bathroom before my brother and father awoke, and be dressed and ready by 6 -- just so I could catch reruns of Jonny Quest on the local ABC affiliate.

At the time, I had no idea the short-lived series had first aired more than a decade earlier (September 1964 to March 1965). To me, the exploits of Jonny Quest, his father Benton, their bodyguard Race and friend Hadji were new, and utterly enthralling. The mix of action-adventure, science fiction and horror was like nothing I'd ever seen.

But more engaging than the plots -- usually, something mysterious happens, and Dr. Quest is called in to help -- was the lush artwork. The backgrounds were richly painted landscapes, vastly different from what I was accustomed to seeing on Saturday-morning television. The scenery, whether it was for a lost city in South America or a castle in Norway, looked real -- at least to my 8-year-old eyes. More importantly, it didn't resemble the clunky backdrops that littered shows like The All-New Super Friends Hour, Tarzan and the Super Seven, and others.

What's more, Jonny Quest could be scary (or at least creepy), something I hadn't experienced in TV cartoons. The endless incarnations of Scooby-Doo teased the possibility of horror, always in the form of some improbable supernatural menace, but the show's formula became apparent to me early on (although the original opening, with the eerie strings and fog horn, was a little frightening).

With Jonny Quest, the danger was often real, at least within the context of the story. Unlike Scooby-Doo, here there was a chance the "monster" was more than a two-bit thug with a smoke machine and a penchant for glowing makeup. Foes like the War of the Worlds-style tentacled robot ("The Robot Spy") and the lumbering mummy ("The Curse of Anubis") were chilling -- even in the show's opening montage (mimicked wonderfully in the opening of The Venture Bros.)

Even the more "mundane" villains, such as the loggers/smugglers in "Werewolf of Timberland," were engaging and unnerving. At least to an 8-year-old.

That was riveting, spooky TV for the milk-and-cookies set.

This whole trip down animated memory lane was triggered by a post on the wonderful Drawn! blog pointing out the gallery of Doug Wildey production art on the Classic Jonny Quest website. Wildey was a Western comics illustrator who made the jump to TV, creating Jonny Quest and working on animated series such as Jana of the Jungle, Planet of the Apes and Godzilla (all childhood favorites). Although Wildey's character designs are great, his custom paintings, based loosely on scenes from the show, are something else.