Rating  - Excellent
This was excellent...It brought me back to my childhood and I am sharing it with my son....
Rating - "Sim Sim Salabim! It's Jonny Quest."
I remember THIS show from way back when. JONNY QUEST debuted in 1964 on primetime TV, lasting (unfortunately) only one 26-episode season despite its ratings, after which it was cancelled by ABC, who couldn't afford it (!) because this animated show demanded so much detail.
Why the DVD is marketed as THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON is a mystery worthy of the show's protagonists as there was only one season.
After being cancelled, JONNY QUEST moved into the land of syndicated Saturday morning cartoons where it held on for seven years, before falling victim to the Children's Television Thought Police who said it was too violent for a young audience (forgetting that it had originally been a primetime show). Apparently, Warner Bros. is of the same mind, having excised some of the violence and much of the colorful language ("Hands up, you monkeys!") from this release. Too bad. After all, JONNY QUEST was of a different era, and this Orwellian desire to bowdlerize everything and rewrite the past doesn't undo what was, it only hides it, and so the lessons are lost.
Never mind the fact that JONNY QUEST was intelligent, imaginative, visionary, and just plain well done. Hanna-Barbera, who gave us THE FLINTSTONES and THE JETSONS (and HUCKLEBERRY HOUND and QUICK-DRAW McGRAW, among many others) pulled out the stops for JONNY QUEST.
Each week, Jonny, his adopted brother Hadji (from India, and always dressed in turban and Nehru jacket), and their dog Bandit, would accompany Jonny's father, Dr. Benton Quest, an eminent scientist and explorer, and his pilot, Roger "Race" Bannon, to the far ends of the earth to make some kind of unique discovery or fight some exotic, usually Eurasian, evildoers.
JONNY QUEST is redolent of the atmosphere of TERRY AND THE PIRATES and the Saturday Matinee film serials of the previous generation of the 1940s. It also owes much to Young Adult book series' such as JACK ARMSTRONG, THE HARDY BOYS, THE THREE INVESTIGATORS, and TOM SWIFT and TOM SWIFT JR.
One week's episode might find Dr. Quest in danger of life and limb while investigating a Mummy's Curse in Egypt, while the next week might find the Quests in China, discovering radioactive emeralds that make time-travel spaceflight possible. Jonny Quest's planet Earth is filled with far-flung places that should be on the map, places with names like Dragonia and Mundania---places that tantalized the imagination of older and younger viewers alike.
There is much of James Bond and DR. NO in JONNY QUEST. If the evildoers are all foreign-sounding, put it down to Cold War paranoia (remember, the show hit the airwaves just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis), and if the tribesmen and locals are a little too primitively savage and speak jungle gibberish, put that down to American naivete. Still, by presenting us with Hadji, JONNY QUEST was the first primetime show to feature a nonwhite character in a major recurring (and equal) role. It was a landmark accomplishment.
The impact of JONNY QUEST can be measured by its impact on another famous Johnny, Johnny Carson. Carson's TONIGHT SHOW character, the psychic Karnak The Magnificent (wearing an oversized turban) borrowed Hadji's mystical incantation, "Sim Sala Bim" for his exercises in mind-reading.
One of the best animated shows of its era, or ever, I always looked forward to JONNY QUEST, and I'm thrilled it's out on DVD. The original episodes are classics, and never grow stale.
Rating  - Just like I remembered
If you saw this series first run as a child you were fortunate. Sadly, this type of entertainment could not be produced today. Buy it and show it to your kids and let them know how the PC crowd has turned their culture into tasteless, spineless, pablum. I am an engineer today partly because of intelligent, interesting programs like J. Quest, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Green Hornet, Lost in Space,etc. Except for Warner Brothers foolist attempt at censorship the quality and content are very good. Long live the days when it was O.K. to say who the good guys were and who the bad guys were and we weren't always so worried about offending someone.
Rating  - Window on an era
I bought this set for my 10-year-old son who discovered Jonny Quest while watching late-night television on Boomerang, a great digital cable channel. He said he really liked the cartoon but rarely got to see it because it was on at 1 a.m. (!) I have to say though that he didn't like it enough to watch it in marathon -- as he has other classic cartoon collections -- because back-to-back, the episodes lack variety. The strength of the series is the use of logic and science. The weakness, in my view, is the recurring elements of military fighting, explosions and character deaths brought by the Cold War-esque enemies. After a while, you just kind of miss Lex Luther.
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