Jonny Quest's 60th Birthday Bash

We have to forget the anniversaries of Brandy & Mr. Whiskers or Asterix at this point. The one animated celebration that worth this mention in 2024 and that keep all the animation community busy is the Jonny Quest's 60th anniversary. (Not to be confuse with the dismal Johnny Test, that it almost stealing the character's name.)

I would like honestly to says anything related to this particular animated series, but I never have experienced the original series, let alone the whole franchise all around. It was a series of "firsts" for the animation industry. It was a much realistic cartoon series than the sub-standard that came from the 1960s. The designs were muchly comic-book-esque than the typical Hanna-Barbera characters designs of old. It has encompassed of human character with actual sense of proportions than you never find out on things like The Jetsons or The Flintstones in this period. The writing and voice-actors cast does the luckless task to add more variety of characters (Like Hadji, that was voiced by Danny Bravo), and speaking of voices, the characters of Jonny and Hadji were voiced by real kids voices. Just before Charles M. Schultz envisionned to hired real kids to voicing the kids characters in his Peanuts' series of specials. It weren't a comedy-buddy show, but an action one. It sadly lasted one season but proven enough popular, by gains a strong cult-following since for be retreaded many decades later on a series of TV sequels series and DTV movies. (Warner Archive have just released the two DTV Quest movies on Blu-Ray and a possible re-release of the original, uncut series with the "authentical" ending credits for each episode is on the works.)

Blogger Noah with his Hanna-Barbera's blog The Exposure Sheet, have posted a series of columnists about the series' legacy that otherwise, action animated shows like Batman: The Animated Series, the 1990s X-Men series or so, Avatar: The Last Airbender (No mention lots of Anime serials) would never existed or be possible. But due to the Flintstones' marketing craze and by be overtaxed, the Jonny Quest series marked like the end of an era, for a while anyway. When animated shows been lucky enough to be shown on Prime-Time, unlike be seen on saturday mornings like that would be the norm the following year, with things like Atom Ant or Secret Squirrel became the firsts original TV cartoons to be released especially for this timeslot. Because before this, saturday mornings was intented for reruns of past shows. And that by the popularity of Cable and oversaturated production, saturday mornings became obsolete by the 1990s and onward.

Like I had to repeat, I am not a Quest expert. This was a rare breed of animated content at that time, by be more serious and sophisticated than anything seen by 1964. Even the old animated blog Animation Revelation (Discontinued since October 2020) has realized its biggest impact and awareness to the artform by be ranked pretty high like at #9 in their 65 Greatest Animated Shows compilation. (Sadly, the list is currently nowhere to be found) Not a bad thing for an animated series that went overbudgeted by lasted only one season, in hope to never be remembered again.