I originally watched something like the first 8 episodes of this series before giving up on it (thankfully Superman premiered not too long after). But with the recent release of the first 13 episodes on dvd I decided to give the show a second chance. Well you know what they say, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Please note that this review is for the first 13 episodes of this series only. The show ended up running 52 episodes in total. I believe that the shows original producers were replaced so the remainder of the series might be better than what I saw here.
To start I would like to single out the biggest flaw of this series, the tone. Actually it would be more appropriate to say that the show had too many tones. There were episodes about religious zealot terrorists followed by episodes of aliens followed by episodes about saving endangered animals followed by episodes about a mad geniuses attacking through virtual reality and best of all an episode about ghost pirates (we'll get back to this one later, trust me). None of these themes is really that great (well maybe the ghost pirates is great) but it's the use of all of them in such a small number of episodes that proves so problematic. You just can't go from "save the whales" to "there is an alien posing as the vice president", it's too jarring. Your show needs an identity, something that the audience can always anchor itself to. Instead the produces of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest just throw as many popular ideas of the time at us as possible and thrust the characters into each premise with no concern about how much sense any of it makes.
As for the series cast, it consists of Jonny Quest, his father Dr. Benton Quest, family body guard Race Bannon (ex-special services), Dr. Quests apprentice Hadji and Races daughter Jessie. Overall this would be a pretty solid base of characters if they had been properly developed. Unfortunately they all come off as generic stereotypes that serve no purpose other than to further the shows so-called plot. Jonny is brash, reckless but ultimately a good natured person who never pushes things too far. In other words he's boring. Jessie provides some much needed estrogen to the show but little else. Given her fathers background you would expect her to have a lot of military skill sets like hand-to-hand combat, weapons expertise etc. This happens to a extent but honestly you never get the feeling that the rest of the characters (she is usually teamed with Jonny or with Jonny and Hadji) really need her, or that they couldn't just as easily do what she can. Hadji serves up nothing more than Indian mystic wisdom cliches while training himself to be some kind of David Blane type endurance expert (so he can put himself into trances so you think he's dead and he can hold his breath for a long time). Race is a body guard with military ties, that's about all I got from him in the first 13 episodes. Finally Dr. Quest is ... well it's hard to say. He's supposed to be some kind of super geniuses scientist but he seems to spend all his time looking into the paranormal and searching for artifacts. More of an archaeologist/ghost hunter than a scientist I would say.
Another problem with the cast is that none of them have any notable flaws. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but having characters who are flawed in some way helps humanize them for the viewers. Make Jonny's reckless nature a problem that ends up hurting someone he cares about. Maybe Jessie has trust issues because her mom abandoned her. Have Race's past come back to haunt him due to questionable actions from his secret service days. You get my point, I want to have characters that grow and change with the show. I want them to have baggage from their past, not just stagnantly stumble their way from episode to episode never any different from the experience.
Alright now I want to talk about the show's writing a little bit; specifically I want to talk about the show's premiere episode "The Darkest Fathoms". In this episode we see the pirate ship of Blackjack Lee sink into the ocean's depths somewhere near the Bermuda islands. Of course there was treasure on board, treasure that Blackjack Lee swore no one would have. Skip ahead to modern times and some divers discover the ship (named The Ivory Web) while searching for oil. Well old Lee won't have none of that so ghost pirates attack the oil expedition. Naturally(?) Dr. Benton Quest is called in to investigate after the attack. Through a series of predictable events Dr. Quest and Jessie get captured by those pesky ghost pirates and Jonny takes off to rescue them. However it turns out they're not real ghost pirates (gasp!). They're just a bunch of shady criminals who are trying to get the gold for themselves and they're using the legacy of Blackjack Lee to scare off anyone who gets too close. To do this they have concocted an over elaborate plot complete with fog machines, wind machines and other special effects to make people think that there are real ghosts guarding the treasure. Now if this plot sounds familiar it's because it's the same plot of EVERY SCOOBY DOO EPISODE EVER MADE!! Seriously ghost pirates? Common Hanna Barbara haven't you covered this ground enough already?
Other horribly offensive plots include 3 "save the animals" episodes; one about elephants, another about a tiger on the loose in the city and the last involves whales. I'm all for going green and what not but after Captain Planet I have a violently allergic reaction to cartoons that preach at me. Also Alien in Washington is so stupid it made me want to travel back in time and punch the show's writer square in the neck. I mean an alien has spent years on earth posing as a human so that he could become vice president and try and stop our government from doing experiments in outer space. How exactly did he come up with this plan? It takes years of political service, maneuvering and media scrutiny for someone to be able to serve in this position of office. Did you start preparing for this knowing that we would some day start experimenting in space? Because this strategy would take years to pull off, not months. What if the presidential candidate doesn't choose you as a running mate? What if you had lost the election? The plot holes in this thing are so big you could fit Rosie O'Donnell's head through them. It would have made more sense for the alien to have taken over the vice presidents body, but the show actually makes a point to tell us that this was not the case. There were several other "alien" themed episodes that were nearly as bad; you can just imagine the shows producers and writers sitting around trying to come up with ways to emulate and leach off the success of the X-files (one of the biggest hits on TV in 1996).
The production quality of these episodes also falls far short of the standards for the time. Based on the inconsistent look you can tell that the animation was sourced out to different studios. The quality of this animation ranges from passable to awful. There are some episodes where the characters are truly flat, with no shading or depth at all. The backgrounds lack any detail or stylization. The merging of CG backgrounds and cell animation is so bad it looks like an armature did it in Photoshop. Character models are inconsistent with changes to hair color and even age happening regularly (Jonny will look 13 in one episode then 16 in another!). Lastly the CG realm of Quest World has aged really badly. Even at the time this was not impressive CG but compared to the standards of today - even TV standards - this stuff is laughable.
Voice acting is at least passable. The characters all have distinct voices that fit their design. Hadji and Races accents are not the best, but I've heard worse. The shows music is serviceable as well. It feels kind of strange to have to use aspects of the show I consider average as a means of complementing the series, but there just isn't much to celebrate here. Actually I do want to call out one aspect of this show that I was impressed by, people die. If you know anything about action/adventure cartoons you know that people - even villains - rarely die (don't want to scare the kids after all). So the fact that numerous people - good and bad - bite the big one in this show was very surprising. And the deaths weren't exactly tame ones either. One villain is stomped to death by an elephant. The oil expedition divers from the premiere episode freeze to death when their heat supply is cut off. Another villain is even mauled by a tiger. Now none of these deaths are shown on screen of course, but the implication is obvious. For a show like this to have the guts to tread on such taboo ground is something to be applauded. Even now it's rare to see people die in an action/adventure cartoon.
As you can tell I didn't like this show. Have I been a little hard on the series? Maybe just a little, but I stand by everything in this review. Much of my displeasure comes from when this show was and not just what this show was. I hold any action/adventure cartoon made after 1992 to a higher standard than the shows that came before (the GI Joes and Thundercat type cartoons). This is because Batman the Animated Series set a higher bar for the genre and any show that was made after that should - at the very least - try and meet or exceed that higher standard. Instead The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest crawled under that bar without even looking up to see where it was. I have no idea if the remaining 39 episodes of this show are any good, but I will say that you should avoid these first 13 at all costs.
