by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
With some extra time
between the truncated ending of American Guerrilla in the Philippines and the beginning of Stephen Colbert’s show,
Charles and I looked for other things to watch on the same flash drive as the
movie and found them in an episode of the 1964-65 animated TV series Jonny
Quest and half of a McGraw-Hill
educational film called Life in the 30’s. Jonny Quest had been
an oddball favorite of both Charles and I from our childhoods — I’d actually
got to see it in its original run and he’d caught up with it in reruns — it was
basically an attempt by the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio to do an
action-adventure animated series with human characters and get it on in prime
time (they’d already done that with The Flintstones and would do that again with The Jetsons — as a kid I always thought The Jetsons was way cooler than The Flintstones — but those were situation comedies and this was an action drama). The
main characters were Professor Quest (voiced by Don Messick), his son Jonny
(Tim Matheson, who later grew up to have an adult acting career, though on this
show he was still using a longer version of his last name, “Matthieson”), his
companion “Race” Bannon (Mike Road), Jonny’s (East) Indian friend Hadji (Danny
Bravo) and his pet dog Bandit, who’s white overall but has black around his
eyes that looks like he’s wearing a domino mask. In one sequence Hadji uses the
magic words, “Sim-salabim!,” and levitates Bandit for no particular reason
other than this is a cartoon, so he can — but for the most part this show is mostly within the bounds of 1960’s
technology extrapolated just a bit to accommodate the characters of the rival
scientific geniuses, the good Professor Quest and the evil Dr. Zin (Vic
Perrin).
“The Robot Spy” begins with the landing of a flying saucer in the
desert near Professor Quest’s secure lab facilities. When its hatch open it
reveals an inhabitant which is a black sphere, with four legs — it walks like a
spider but, of course, with only half the complement of its real-life model’s
legs (meaning less work for the animators), and it opens a lid to reveal a
single red eye in the middle of its “head” with which it can see virtually
anything. Of course, Professor Quest and Race Bannon (imagine, a guy named
Bannon on TV with a decent haircut!) take it inside the lab — where it turns
out its origins aren’t extraterrestrial at all: it’s really a robot spy (as if
you couldn’t guess from the title!) which the evil Dr. Zin — who shows us a
typical example of cartoon-villain insensitivity by batting away the food tray
containing his dinner when his long-suffering servant brings it to him because
he’s too lost in concentration over his experiment to want to be disturbed
(being the servant of a super-villain is probably really hard work!) — is masterminding. He inserted the
robot spy into a flying saucer as a Trojan horse, knowing that Quest couldn’t
resist bringing it into his lab, where it’s going to download the plans for
Quest’s super-weapon, the Para-Power Ray Gun, which can stop mechanical devices
without injuring the humans working them. Only the robot spy can’t then upload
the plans to Dr. Zin’s computer back at home base: it must physically carry
them back to Dr. Zin’s redoubt, which means that the Quests (of course Jonny
and Hadji tag along to the operation) and Bannon have a chance to stop it. Of
course, this being a comic-adventure menace, bullets just bounce off the thing;
it also resists flame-throwers and crashes through the electrified fence around
the Quest lab, so the Quests have to trot out the Para-Power Ray Gun even
though they haven’t tested it yet. The ending is predictable (though it is something of a surprise to see the flying saucer
blow up as it lands, when the whole point of the super-weapon is to shoot
things down without damaging
them long-term!), but overall Jonny Quest is a fun show, at least in part because to modern eyes Professor Quest
and “Race” Bannon come off as a Gay couple, presumably raising Jonny after his
mother died and left the professor a widow. I barely knew anything about same-sex relationships when this show was
originally aired and even I read something more than just a professional or friendship relationship
between the two adult men on the show!
