Jonny Quest is 60

Kids like to laugh. Kids like a bit of adventure, too. That’s why Jonny Quest turned out to be such a success.

You’d think that a TV show that lasted one season was a failure. Maybe in live action it is. But Hanna-Barbera took three cancelled cartoon series—Top Cat, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest—and made them into hits. They were put into front of kids' eyes over and over in reruns and all were eventually re-booted (an all-new Quest series appeared in 1986).

Jonny Quest was filled with humans (and a comic-relief dog) involved in adventure and suspense. Kids ate up this kind of stuff in comic books and the Sunday colour comic pages. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera knew what their staff could do. Their studio had artists who had worked on Sleeping Beauty at Disney so they were familiar with animating humans in some form.

Today marks 60 years since The Adventures of Jonny Quest debuted on ABC-TV. Yes, I was among the viewers even though I had no interest in high adventure shows. But this was a cartoon, so I watched.

Was it Walt Disney who said the key to success in animation is story, story and story? Quest—for my eight-year-old eyes and ears, anyway—had great stories. You wanted to see what happened next. And Jonny had maturity. Television was filled with kids who were "precocious" jerks or goody-goodies. Jonny was capable of thinking and standing on his own in tight situations.

Oh, did I mention the eyeball walking on spider legs?

Way back in the early days of the blog, we reprinted this fine feature story from the Levittown Times a few weeks before the series debuted. Here is a little shorter one from the Anaheim Bulletin, Sept. 12, 1964. As it is unbylined and appeared in various newspapers, I presume it is an ABC press release.

‘Jonny Quest’ To Fill High Adventure Void
Joe Barbera, the ebullient half of the creative animation team of Hanna-Barbera, believes their new half-hour series ABC-TV’s “Jonny Quest” will fill a recent void in entertainment.
“We haven’t had anything where kids can identify with high adventure,” he pointed out. “Jonny Quest is escapism, the stuff of which dreams are made. It’s Tom Swift, the Rover Boys and Jack Armstrong all rolled into one.”
The series is the most unusual and ambitious undertaking at the ink factory that has produced the likes of “The Flintstones,” “Yogi Bear” and “Huckleberry Hound.” It employs 350 artists and costs a third again as much as the firm’s other shows.
The principal difference is in technique. Barbera refers to “Quest” as staged illustration rather than a cartoon style.
“It’s a brand new style for TV,” he added. “Every master shot is a work of art.”
Barbera said the program takes its principals, 11-year-old Jonny, son of an American scientist and international trouble-shooter and his young Hindu companion, Hadji, on an imaginative adventures in a different world-wide locale every week. “There is lots of action,” he said, “and we use the Douglas Fairbanks approach, where in the villains are disposed of in a flamboyant virtually comedy style.
Extensive research safeguards accurate representation of the ethnic and topographic qualities of the areas depicted, Barbara said. This gives a soft-sell educational aspect to the series.
“That is a happy by-product,” he went on. “Our primary target is entertainment.”
Watching and listening to Barbera effuse about the program is an experience in itself.
A swarthy, handsome ex-New Yorker who began his career as an accountant with a bent for drawing, he moves swiftly about his large, tastefully appointed office grabbing for multi-pictured storyboards, character studies or research material to punctuate each point.
Barbera plays all the parts. And he can recite the plots of every one of the 26 episodes without stumbling once.
His partner, quiet, analytical Bill Hanna, a one-time structural engineer from New Mexico, lets the fiery Barbera make the spiels. Both are casual dressers. They don’t believe in reams of inter-office memos. Thus, the atmosphere about their new three-story, $1 ¼-million studio bespeaks quiet efficiency under the burden of a staggering workload.
With the addition of “Jonny Quest,” Hanna-Barbera have 13 TV properties being viewed by 300-million people in 42 countries, plus a feature length film, their first, entitled “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear.”

Hanna-Barbera’s eventual layout chief, Iwao Takamoto, explained the genesis of Jonny Quest in his autobiography. Doug Wildey had been hired to find a way to animate the old kids’ radio serial Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Then Joe Barbera changed his mind. Why not go for something with a little more action, like Milt Caniff’s Sunday newspaper comic Terry and the Pirates?

To quote from Iwao:

“Jonny Quest” was an example of how sophisticated planned animation had become, particularly in the hands of an incredibly clever layout man like Bill Perez. Bill and another artist named Tony Sgroi were exceptional at figuring out how to reuse drawings without making it look like they were being repeated, by “fielding” them, or presenting them in camera range, in different ways. Between the two of them, they used every bit of the trickery that went into planned animation in the first place and came up with a few new tricks of their own. This way they were able to keep their episodes within the budget, which was already high for an animated television show. Some of the other artists, particularly the ones from the comic-book field, who were not accustomed to the techniques of planned animation, tended to run rampant with the budgets, and the costs of these episodes skyrocketed.
Many people have asked why such a great show lasted only one season, and the reason is very simple: it just cost too damned much to continue to do it at the same level of quality. Money proved to be the thing that accomplished what “Dr. Zin” and all of the show’s other villains could not do, which was stop Jonny Quest. When Bill Hanna estimated the price tag for a second season, the network simply said no thanks. Perhaps that is just as well, because that one season of “Jonny Quest,” I feel is a highlight of the studio’s history.

There was another factor Iwao omits. The Flintstones was being crushed under a boulder of higher ratings by The Munsters over at CBS. ABC reacted by moving the Modern Stone Age Family into the Quest time slot to get the numbers needed to ensure renewal for another season (and enable Hanna-Barbera to sell more Flintstones merchandise). Quest moved opposite The Munsters. Cancellation followed. After a bit of a break, Jonny Quest’s old episodes surfaced on Saturday morning re-runs in the 1967-68 season, finding an eager audience.

Bill Hanna once said the prime time run of Quest pushed the studio in a direction which put Space Ghost, The Herculoids and The Fantastic 4 on Saturday mornings. The series certainly should be considered, the Fleischer Superman shorts notwithstanding, the father of action-adventure cartoon shows in North America.

We can't let a post on Jonny Quest go by without referring to the theme song, and composer Hoyt Curtin's desire to make it so complicated for trombonists, there was no way they could play it. The mood library he (and others) created for the series is a true masterpiece. Here are two versions of the opening theme.





Curtin composed another "theme" for Jonny Quest, one that sounds right out of the James Bond movie Dr. No. It can be heard on the H-B Records album Jonny Quest in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. You can hear it by clicking below.


I had thought Greg Ehrbar, who knows more about H-B Records than anyone alive, profiled this album, but I can not find it [Late note: See Greg's comment]. But Greg has done Hanna-Barbera fans a great service and tracked down Jonny himself. He interviewed Tim Matheson about playing the boy adventurer and you can listen it here.

He Was Hadji

Whenever Hanna-Barbera had kid characters in the 1950s, adults who had come from radio did the voices.

Things changed when Jonny Quest came along in 1964.

Someone made the decision to go with boy actors to play boy roles instead of hiring Dick Beals or Nancy Wible or other adults who approximated child voices.

There was a real danger in this (no, we don’t mean Toby Danger). Boys age. And when a boy has aged enough and his voice changes, he’s aged himself out of a role. This didn’t happen on Quest simply because it lasted only one season.

Tim Matthieson was hired for the main role and for the role of his friend and companion, Hadji, the studio cast actor Danny Bravo.

Bravo played Michael Littlebear, a young orphaned native boy, in 20th Century Fox’s For the Love of Mike, released in 1960. The screen credit read “Introducing Danny Bravo as Michael” as if he were a brand-new actor. But that wasn’t the case at all. Some pieces in print about the time the film appeared in theatres or in production as The Golden Touch gave his real name—Danny Zaldivar.

TV viewers might have seen him as a Mexican boy in a 1959 episode of G.E. Theatre called “Beyond the Mountains” (the syndicated TV Key service said his performance made the show worthwhile) or on Alcoa Theatre the following year in “The Storm.” He even did comedy in a parody called “They Went Thataway” on New Comedy Showcase on CBS in the summer of 1960.

The Windsor Star’s entertainment editor had this to say about him in The Love of Mike:

If Danny Bravo ever decides to try to realize his original ambition to become a matador, there’s a great chance the world many yet see another Manuelito in future years—this time from Los Angeles, California. Despite the fact that he has graced this sphere for only 12 years, Danny has all the determination and drive necessary to bring him to the top of any profession he chooses.

Doug Wildey, the creator of the series, talked to Comics Scene magazine about the series. He didn’t explain how Bravo came to be cast, but did reveal to writer Will Murray how and why he invented Hadji:

It was while creating the early cast that Wildey ran into his first creative disagreement on Jonny Quest. Someone at Hanna-Barbera suggested adding a bulldog to the cast for toy licensing purposes. Thus was born the irrepressible Bandit.
“I fought against Bandit quite a while,” Wildey recalls. “He was a cartoon dog. It was a little bit too unrealistic for the characters. As soon as they put in Bandit, I immediately created Hadji. I felt very strongly that we needed someone besides a dog. It’s simply not natural for a kid to talk to grown-ups on the same level.”
The final addition to the cast, Hadji was a Hindu boy with undefined mystical power. Although he first appeared in the second episode, the story of how he saved Dr. Quest’s life and joined the team wasn’t told until episode #7, "Calcutta Adventure.” He was mysteriously absent from other segments. Actually, these were pre-Hadji episodes shown out of production sequence.
Hadji was loosely based on '40s film actor Sabu. "Later on," Wildey recalls, “when we were auditioning for voices on the series, Sabu's son, Paul Sabu, showed up to audition.”

What did Bravo have to say about Jonny Quest? Nothing I’ve been able to find. During the show’s original run, Joe Barbera did all the talking to newspapers; you can find some of those columns reproduced on this blog. No one seemed interested in talking with the actors, less so as the show’s ratings dropped and the series was sacrificed to keep the merchandise-heavy The Flintstones on the air by switching their time slots. I’ve found one unbylined blurb in the Buffalo Evening News, March 28, 1964. I presume this was a PR handout from Screen Gems.

Danny Bravo, the “voice” of Hadji, the Hindu boy who uses his knowledge of the mysteries of the east to great advantage in Screen Gems’ new animated adventure series, Jonny Quest (Ch. 7, Fridays, 7:30 PM), began his career as an actor at the ripe old age of nine. He is in demand in many TV series because of his Latin heritage and his knowledge of foreign accents.

Danny appeared in a few more supporting roles in various TV shows in the 1960s. An unusual “credit” shows up in the Torrence, California paper, The Daily Breeze, of April 30, 1965 in a story about an awards ceremony at a high school in Lawndale. One of the presenters was “Danny Bravo, star of the television series ‘Mamie McPheeters’.”

Star of what?? Did the show actually exist? Maybe it had a dog named Bandit. (Late note: See Top Cat James' clarification about the series in the comments section).

Bravo returned to Hanna-Barbera in The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1968-69 TV season) and vanished from view.

I can’t confirm unsourced information on the internet, so I don’t know where Bravo went after that or what he’s doing today. What I can confirm is we’ll have a post on Jonny Quest’s 60th “birthday.”

Remember, there’s a link to Jonny Quest posts in the right-side column.

He Was Zin

John Stephenson lasted only five episodes before being replaced as Doctor Benton Quest on Jonny Quest in 1964. But another actor on the show got shoved out of a role even faster.

The evil Dr. Zin was played by Vic Perrin. Perrin was constantly in demand on network radio, even into the dying days. But when he was hired in 1947 for the starring role in the Mutual network's The Zane Grey Show, he was fired after the first broadcast. The trade papers said he sounded more like a villain than a hero, so they brought in Jim Bannon.

You can tell from the first sentence that this year marks 60 years since Quest debuted in prime time. I’m an old guy so, yes, I watched it (on a black and white TV) during its original broadcast. I hope to have a post on the debut anniversary. For now, I thought I’d do a post about the man who made four villainous appearances on the show.

I’m not a huge fan of Wikipedia, but in the case of Vic Perrin the entry is very good. It looks like the writer got his information from Perrin’s obit in the Los Angeles Times or the Hollywood Reporter. What you read below comes from other sources.

Victor Herbert Perrin was born on April 26, 1916 in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. His father was a travelling hardware salesman. At the age of 19, he was employed at WHA radio in Madison, Wisconsin and a member of the WHA Players. He emceed events and appeared in stage productions including “The Merchant of Venice” and “The Merry Widow.” Newspaper clippings reveal he was still at WHA as late as May 1940.

Next it was off to Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. Broadcasting magazine of May 16, 1942 reported he first found work as a parking lot attendant, then as an NBC page, then joined the announcing staff of the Red network. In July of 1941, he was on the NBC Blue network, where he introduced Hank McCune in a 15-minute weekly show called Pacific Coast Army Camp News and stayed with the network when it was spun off by NBC, eventually being named ABC. Promotion was quick. The trades reported in January 1943 he had replaced Army-bound Dresser Dahlstead as chief announcer of the network. When Dahlstead returned, Perrin quit ABC in October 1945 to freelance.

Perrin did a pile of shows on radio, even into the 1960s. A list would be pointless, though we point out he was a particular favourite of Jack Webb, and cast a number of times on Dragnet, and co-starred with Raymond Burr on CBS' Fort Laramie. There was acting work in television, too; Perrin appeared in both the radio and TV versions of Gunsmoke, among many things. A weekly role on television for a number of seasons was uncredited. His voice was the one you heard at the beginning of Outer Limits. Almost all his work was on the dramatic side, though he did appear in one episode of the sitcom I Remember Joan.

Perrin's first connection with animation I can find was a few years before Jonny Quest. In September 1957, he was the host of the fifth annual Screen Cartoonists Guild's Cartoon Festival.

You wouldn’t find Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry at this showing. This was a showcase for studios that made animated commercials. For the record, the studios were: Animation, Inc.; Cascade Pictures (home of Tex Avery); Churchill-Wexler; Fine Arts Productions; Graphic Films; Ray Patin Productions; Quartet Films, Inc.; Shamus Culhane Productions, Sherman Glas Productions; Song Ads, Inc., John Sutherland Productions; Telemation; T.V. Spots, Inc. and Le Ora Thompson and Associates. It would appear Perrin was providing voice-overs for animated spots. To the right is a trade ad from Dec. 29, 1958. (Dick Le Grand and Virginia Gregg were also radio actors; see Mike Tiefenbacher's note in the comments about Gregg's Hanna-Barbera connection).

We briefly pause from our Perrin story to post frames from some of the ads that appeared at the Festival; another one was the famous Jell-O Chinese Baby from Ray Patin Productions. I cannot tell you if he voiced any of them.



The Hollywood Reporter of Nov. 2, 1960 mentions that Perrin was recording seven cartoon spots for Pacific Telephone Yellow Pages, directed for Playhouse Pictures by Pete Burness. The same page revealed on March 16, 1962 that Playhouse's Bill Melendez had Perrin voicing five spots for the Interstate Building Assn. A week later, the Reporter blurbed that Playhouse hired him and Dick Tufeld (the "brought-to-you-by" announcer on The Jetsons) to voice a pair of animated commercials for Southern California Gas, directed by Melendez. And on Nov. 2, 1962, the paper squibbed that Perrin, Lucy Ann Polk and Dick Cathcart were providing voices for Ralston and Foremost commercials; the animation director wasn't revealed.

Unfortunately, information isn’t available about his hiring at Hanna-Barbera and when he recorded the Jonny Quest voice tracks. The episodes he appeared as Dr. Zin were:

● Riddle of the Gold, October 16, 1964.
● The Robot Spy, November 6, 1964.
● Double Danger, November 13, 1964.
● The Fraudulent Volcano, December 31, 1964.

My recollection from the Jonny Quest documentary on-line is series creator Doug Wildey opposed the idea of a regular villain. As it turned out, Dr. Zin was only in four of the twenty-six episodes, though he did return—as did Perrin—when the series was retooled in the 1980s. Perrin played other parts in the original series as well. A sentimental favourite is Perrin as the scheming Dr. Ahmed Kareem in “The Curse of Anubis” simply because at the climax, my sister got so scared, she ran out of the living room vowing never to watch the show again.

We’ll spare you another shopping list of animated accomplishments at Hanna-Barbera and elsewhere, other than to mention his work ranged from comedy (The Hair Bear Bunch and several series with a gangly Great Dane) to action-adventure (Space Ghost). His voice was in a Lutheran-made animated Christmas special with a fine cast that included Don Messick, the wonderful June Foray, Hans Conried, Jerry "We're-not-hiring-you-as-Pebbles" Hausner and Colleen Collins, who was heard in a number of Tex Avery cartoons at MGM. Perrin did a number of live-action religious-based films. Click here for his narration on a half-hour for the Franciscans, with "Good Clean Fun" and other cues from the Impress library in the background, and a role for Pat McGeehan, who voiced a noise-hating bear and other characters for Avery.

Perrin was apparently not interviewed in the popular press about his animation career—he did talk his work on Jonny Quest to Starlog magazine in an issue not available on line—but spoke about commercial acting. Several stories showed up in newspapers in early 1967; I suspect they were releases that came out of the office of his agent, Jack Wormser.

Actor Makes Handsome Sum As TV 'Voice'
VIC PERRIN is one actor who makes more money when he's not seen on camera than when he is.
He belongs to that exclusive breed in show business that has hit it big as the anonymous voices on TV commercials.
Last year Perrin earned in excess of $100,000 of which 80 per cent was from TV (and radio) commercials.
Vic, who has appeared on such TV shows as “The Big Valley,” “FBI Story,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Have Gun, Will Travel,” is never seen in TV commercials on purpose.
"MY BELIEVABILITY as an actor is reduced in direct proportion to how often I'm seen in a commercial," he explains.
Perrin is a serious actor and maintains that an acting background is the No. 1 essential to success in the lucrative commercial field.
"I try to give a TV pitch reading the same serious treatment that I would give to a speech by Henry V,” he maintains.
Some professional TV critics maintain that many commercials are better than the program in which they are inserted. Perrin agrees.
"I think there is more creativity going into commercials these days than into many of the programs," he says.

Wormser, by the way, represented a who’s who of cartoon voice actors who worked in commercials, including Mel Blanc. Perrin and Blanc have another connection; as The Hollywood Reporter of Aug. 29, 1972 stated Perrin had been hired as a teacher at the Mel Blanc School of Commercials.

Perrin and Blanc died six days apart. Perrin was 73 when he died of cancer on July 4, 1989.

The House of the Seven Gargoyles

Dick Thomas pulled a huge workload at the Hanna-Barbera studio. He arrived in 1959 from Walt Disney (after almost two decades at Warner Bros.) to work on the Kellogg’s series, and was providing backgrounds not only for short after short, but for complete episodes of the half-hour prime-time series.

The painting below is part of the opening scene for “The House of Seven Gargoyles” episode of Jonny Quest. Thomas was tasked with making all the background art for this cartoon from layouts of no fewer than four artists—Iwao Takamoto, Jerry Eisenberg, Lew Ott and Sparky Moore. There are plenty of shadows, overhead shots and overlays in the artwork.


We can’t snip together complete backgrounds because of the overlays (foreground cels that move at a different speed than the background pan) but these will give you an idea what Thomas came up with.



The owl’s head is animated, the rest of the body is stiff.



A few of the background pans are reused and there are the usual Hanna-Barbera shortcuts, such as characters on a cel that is slid on a background, heads talking while bodies are stiff and that sort of thing. One thing that irked me as a kid is there are at least two Jonny Quest cartoons with realistically rendered cars but only the wheels move. The car doesn’t bounce a bit on the road. It’s rigid. It looks unnatural. When you see that kind of thing in a Huckleberry Hound cartoon, it’s one thing, but it looks out of place in the Jonny Quest world.



I may have pointed this out before, but in case I haven’t, you may not have noticed that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s credits alternate. Hanna’s name is first in one cartoon, then Barbera’s in the next. I’m certain this goes back to their MGM days.



Jonny Quest is out on Blu-Ray, and it’s a treat to see that Warners has made the effort to put the proper end credits on the cartoons (as well as restore some cut footage in the DVD release of several years ago). It means Dick Thomas and others can get the credit they deserve.

Flintstones Vs Jonny Quest

Doug Wildey, who gets credit for creating Jonny Quest, once grumbled about the artists working on the series as being, to paraphrase him, “Flintstones animators.”

That was true, but some of them had also come from Walt Disney, where they had animated on Sleeping Beauty. They weren’t hack artists who could draw nothing but talking animal caricatures.

I thought of that when I ran across this newspaper piece about the difference between Jonny Quest and The Flintstones. It’s unbylined, so it may have been a publicity handout from the PR department working alongside Wildey at Hanna-Barbera, or it could have been from ABC. It would seem self-evident what the differences are between the styles of the two shows, but perhaps it was written for publication before Quest debuted. It appeared in several papers; this one is from the News Leader of Staunton, Virginia, November 27, 1964.

There was one similarity between the two series, besides being made by the same studio. In a way, they had the same time-slots at ABC. The Flintstones was getting, er, stoned in the ratings by The Munsters on CBS, so ABC swapped time-slots. That saved The Flintstones from cancellation, allowing its huge merchandising to get another season of free TV publicity. Poor Jonny and Bandit didn’t attract enough adults in its new slot to entice sponsors to put up the kind of advertising money Quest needed to stay in production for another season, so it came to an end in 1965. (Later incarnations notwithstanding). Even if it had stayed on, one wonders how much longer Tim Matheson’s voice could hold out from the effects of time.

Cartoonist Compares Shows
HOLLYWOOD—"There's a big contrast between 'Jonny Quest' and 'The Flintstones,' and that's what makes the two series so much fun to work on," said Joe Barbera, co-producer with William Hanna of the two animated series airing in prime time on ABC-TV.
"I hate having the word educational used in connection with one of our shows, but truly, 'Jonny Quest' has many educational aspects for youngsters," stated Barbera.
"First of all, there's the magnificent art work which we used as backgrounds. It would be impossible for a live or filmed TV show to show such authentic and thoroughly beautiful surroundings as backgrounds for their shows. It would be far too expensive. In 'Jonny Quest,' we take viewers to all parts of the world with our unique backgrounds."
A product of over two years of research by Hanna-Barbera artists and story editors, "Jonny Quest" brings up-to-date adventure to the television screens. "The Flintstones" deals with adventures in the stone age.
The type of art work is different, also. In "Jonny Quest," the art style is illustrative, while "The Flintstones" is pure cartoon-art, using strictly cartoon characters. The characters in "Jonny Quest" are more life-like.

Explaining this difference in the type of characters, Bill Hanna said, "The idea actually stemmed from the beautiful color background drawings for 'Jonny Quest' which Joe and I thought were so stimulating. We realized that here was a different approach to animation, so we decided that the characters should be different by animating them in a life-like manner.
"In 'The Flintstones' it's entirely different," Hanna continued. "The backgrounds are strictly caricature, and we designed the characters to conform."
The stories used on "Jonny Quest" and "The Flintstones" also are contrasting. The only parallel drawn is that the stories for both series are written expressly for family viewing and not toward one age group above another. Barbera and Hanna insist that there be something for every member of the family in every story on both series.
The differences between the two series point up Bill Hanna's and Joe Barbera's versatility. The pair have parlayed two strongly contrasting shows into a real success story. "That's what keeps us going," concluded Barbera. "The contrast makes for more stimulating work and keeps us on our toes. That's what I mean by our work being fun."

The Quest For Publicity

Jonny Quest was an amazing series for its time in so many ways, from Hoyt Curtin’s score (and the work of the sound cutters to pick the cues to fit the action), to the background art, to the suspenseful stories to angles picked by the layout men. It’s unfortunate the show never got the ratings necessary to be able to continue for a second season.

Hanna-Barbera was coming off a string of losses. Top Cat failed in prime time in 1961. The Jetsons did the same the following year. The failures made the networks shy from buying animated series for evening hours, but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera convinced ABC to make one more try in 1964.

To push Jonny Quest in the press prior to its debut, Hanna-Barbera trotted out its super salesman—Joe Barbera. Among his many talents, Barbera adeptly knew how to plug his cartoons. He was also very good at selling the story of Hanna-Barbera, the little underdog operation, run by two ordinary guys (and Oscar-winners, make sure you mention that), that became a monster success.

Here’s a nice feature story that appeared in a couple of papers on October 24, 1964; it appears the writer was a scribe for several newspapers in Pennsylvania. If you’ve checked out other Quest newspaper stories on this blog, some of Barbera’s talking points will be familiar. Joe mentions “units.” I suspect he’s referring to something Jerry Eisenberg mentioned, that he and Lew Ott teamed up to work on Jonny Quest. I haven’t checked the credits to see if the same sets of animators worked together but as reader Howard Fein has pointed out, Carlo Vinci and Hugh Fraser worked together on a number of half-hour shows.

One other note: Chris Webber’s blog has some frame grabs from the Quest DVD (I’ve grabbed some of his grabs). It’s a shame he didn’t blog for long but you can check out some artwork there.

Animators Using New Technique In 'Quest'
By RUTH E. THOMPSON
"In 'Jonny Quest' we have design planes that are possible, but slightly ahead of what's really available because equipment evolves so fast. And you can't tell children that last year's jet is next year's. They won't believe it."
They also won't buy it . . . and it was the licensing and franchising of "Jonny Quest" products that had brought soft-spoken, Brooklyn-born Joseph Barbera back East for a quickie New York visit.
And you don't need more proof that that that "Jonny" which bowed in color in September on ABC (Fridays, 7:30 p.m.) is a sure success. But as Barbera spread a circle of prints from "Jonny Quest" around him you felt that that wasn't what mattered so much. He kept talking, thinking in terms of series' values and audience acceptance.
"We're using, a whole new technique in Quest. It's illustration, not cartooned. We brought some of the best illustrators from around the country for this one. "Of course the others are doing fine, too. Oh you like 'The Flintstones?' So do I."
"But the story in 'Quest' did seem to cry for something new. We have a leading scientist much sought after for consultation and sought out, naturally by enemies. That's why the government assigns Race (isn't he handsome) as permanent bodyguard.

"Then there's the doctor's 12-year-old Jonny and his adopted Jaji [sic], who's from India.
"We went one-third over our expected budget researching, enough to make sure our background are authentic. Now we can travel around as no live company could possibly afford to do . . . and with the good art work you should feel you're there."
20 Nice Years, 7 Mercurial Ones
Barbera is one-half of the seven-year corporate miracle that is Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1937 Bill Hanna chucked the engineering and journalism he'd studied for, to do something more creative, being idea man and director for animated cartoons. Joe Barbera chucked the banking and accounting for which he'd studied, to draw magazine cartoons. MGM saw him, as a animator-writer teamed with Hanna and together they created "Tom and Jerry," turned off some 125 episodes and won seven Oscars by 1957 when—after two decades in the same shop and with growing families—they got their pink slips. MGM was getting out of the animated field.
On went the Bill and Joe thinking caps. What came out as a goal was television. Back to MGM they went with "the big idea." Wouldn't MGM like to consider the medium? MGM would not.
"So we decided to go into business for ourselves." The Screen Gems TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures sensed a hot idea and went along with financing and distribution phase.
The work space was nil, the staff numbered three, but the enthusiasm was boundless, and in a short time out came a 15-minute show "Ruff and Reddy," still seen in many parts of the world.
"Well, you see, there really was a need for something new, fresh animations especially for television. Re-runs of old—usually very old—theatre cartoons was pretty much it when we got in," Barbara explains. "And the more we got into it, the more we found innovations to simplify production and add interest.
Barbara reached for another photo.
"This is the new building. Isn't it a honey?

"We turn off as much production here in a week as we did at MGM in a year . . . and with no time clocks, no memos and a minimum of supervision. Our units work out the details themselves.
"Do I draw any more?" He smiled. "Well, only to the extent that I'll show an artist what I might have in mind, rather than try to tell him . . . but otherwise it's up to a unit to do its own work."
"Unit," that seems to be the Hanna-Barbera modern invention to outstrip anything that's being designed in "Quest."
"You see we feel it's up to creative people to determine their own best working hours. Each unit determines its own deadlines, by what time one phase of a job has to be finished so another can proceed. Everybody works hard, but at times of personal choosing, and it proves to be the times when they produce fastest and best."
And the "fastest and best" dossier now totals—with this season's "Jonny Quest"—13 series in seven years! ("The Flintstones," "Huckleberry Hound," "Yogi Bear," "Quick Draw McGraw," "Touche Turtle," among others).
And as for Barbera, "Well, I never sleep anyway, but it's worse right now on a trip." There's one irony, though. Barbera, who turned his back on banking for the creative life, has to pay more and more attention to finance.

It's Not About the Cartoons

Here I was, a kid bounding out of bed early Saturday morning to park myself in front of the TV to watch cartoons, thinking it was all about funny characters doing and saying things I could laugh at.

How wrong I was.

It was all about money.

To the right you see an ad in Women’s Wear Daily telling you, Mr. and Mrs. American Clothing Manufacturer, that you can buy up the rights to make Winnie Witch pyjamas or Squiddly Diddley slippers and watch the profits roll in. Winnie who? Squiddly what? Yes, it’s true, the cartoons haven’t even debuted yet, but look at the Bill and Joe track record!

My innocence and naivety wants to believe that when Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were stupidly punted from MGM amidst financial and corporate turmoil in 1957, their sole reason to create cartoons was to create entertainment. But by 1965, Barbera himself admitted that wasn’t case. “We ask ourselves, would you want to take this character-to-be as a stuffed toy? If not, out it goes.” (It begs the question, who would want a stuffed ant? But let us move on).

1965 also marked a change at Hanna-Barbera. Previously, it had made cartoons for family viewing in the early evening hours, and then in prime time. Now, it was concentrating strictly on children’s programming by providing new product (dare I call it that?) for Saturday mornings. It was a natural and logic extension of the studio’s reason for existing. Originally, it provided new, made-for-TV cartoons in an era where stations showed old theatricals. Before 1965, almost all cartoons on Saturday mornings were old theatricals or reruns (Linus the Lionhearted from Ed Graham being a notable exception). Now Hanna-Barbera would make new, made-for-TV cartoons for that time period. Hanna-Barbera was wildly successful in the early evening hours. It became, arguably, even more wildly successful in Saturday mornings, bouncing old filmed shows like Fury and puppet programmes off the air.

When Magilla Gorilla was about to air, H-B had teased kids with an almost prime-time special which, in essence, was a half-hour ad for the show (as the show was syndicated, stations picking it up aired the special whenever convenient). In 1965, the studio did it again to push its coming Secret Squirrel and Atom Ant shows. The special was quickly sold to Kellogg and Mattel, then plunked into a Sunday 6:30 p.m. time slot on NBC. Alas, kids in the Eastern time zone missed the first 25 minutes because a golf match ran long. Nonetheless, they dutifully parked themselves in front of their TVs on Saturday, October 2nd at 9:30 a.m. (8:30, Central time) to watch the debut of Hanna-Barbera’s latest starring characters.

H-B was still fine in 1965 as far as critics were concerned, thanks to the fun Huck Hound, Quick Draw and Yogi Bear shows, and the popularity of the Flintstones. No less a critic than Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times heaped praise on the studio in this piece the paper’s syndicate disseminated on its wire. A version of it originally appeared in the Times on May 5th that year (the ad below appeared in the Times; similar drawings showed up in other papers).

A Factory of Geniuses
Flicker Cartoons Improve With Age
By Charles Champlin.
LOS ANGELES—Some scholar probably will drive up in a buggy and tell me that the animated cartoon was invented in Mesopotamia in the year 7 B.C. and that there are cave drawings of a cartoon character named Hippy Hamster with big ears and pie-slice eyes, from whom the whole genre descended. Nevertheless, the animated cartoon seems to me to be the equivalent in the visual arts of jazz in the music field as a distinctive and indigenous American contribution to the world scene.
Unlike many youthful enthusiasms which have had to be left behind in Nostagliaville, like Buck Jones serials, Ralston straight-shooter pins and penny candy you don’t have to pick up with tweezers, the animated cartoon continues to flourish.
In fact, the argument here is that, nostalgia be damned, the cartoon is one of those rare beasts that has improved with age. It has lost its saccharine, hearts-and-flowers quality and become so hip and switched-on that it has all the characteristics of an electric train set—ostensibly for the kiddies, but it’s the grown-ups who are rolling on the floor.
Television inaugurated the golden age, and for one TV season it looked as if the cartoons would drown in their own success. Operating on the familiar adage that “if it works, copy it,” the networks in 1961 went so cartoon-happy that there was talk of animating the Huntley-Brinkley report. there was, as you’ll remember, the Alvin Show, and there was Calvin and the Colonel, and there were Bullwinkle and Top Cat and the Flintstones and the whole Hanna-Barbera menagerie that really unleashed it all in 1957.
It was too good to last, or rather it was not quite good enough to last as a prime-time caper, and some of the cells went dead. Bullwinkle, which I think history will regard as the Krazy Kat of televised cartoons, survives in re-run but no new ones are being made although the Jay Ward-Bill Scott team has other shows in preparation.
The winners and still champs, survivors of the debacle that threatened to over-compensate and (a favorite showbiz habit) wipe out the good along with the bad, are Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna. And what winners.
Somebody has called them “baby sitters to the world,” and it’s got to be true. Something like 335 million people in 55 countries watch the HB product every week.

There’s a Yogi Bear feature film in the works and an hour-long “Alice in Wonderland” special for ABC-TV. There’ll shortly be a slew of Hanna-Barbera label records featuring the various characters. Plans are afoot to make Yogi Bear a disc jockey.
Next fall, by present plan, there’ll be not less than 18 Hanna-Barbera half-hours a week on television, and it is very possible that Hanna-Barbera will be competing with itself on all three networks on Saturday mornings.
Their moated and be-fountained fun factory in Hollywood keeps 250 geniuses off the streets, and there Atom Ant and Secret Squirrel are taking shape for NBC for the fall.
One sizable room at the factory is crammed floor to ceiling with samples of tie-in merchandise, and at that, this trove represents only 5 per cent of the available itemage. It ranges from the usual books and toys to sheets, window shades and a Japanese Yogi Bear lunch bucket which is about the size of a paperback edition of “The Good Earth” and is segmented for fish and rice.
When I stopped in at the factory, Joe Barbera was talking to one of the writers who works at home (Seattle, as it happens) but was in for the day . . . “Flies across the field and knocks down the trees, chonk, chonk, chonk!” the writer was saying. “Right, right, right,” said Joe.
“We figure our audience starts at 4,” he was saying later. “By then the kids have the strength to turn on the set and change channels. And they’re so smart then, so discriminating. You can’t fool around with them or give them the fairy tale stuff.
“Here you see two guys running like mad to keep abreast of their interests. You never get old in our business. You can’t. You’ve got to be on top of the times. And not just for kids, either. I’m on a screaming campaign to make the point that cartoons are not just for kids. They’re for everybody.”
Bill Hanna and Joe have their own research and development staff, dreaming up characters and premises for two and three seasons hence. The basic test is simple.
Says Barbera, “We ask ourselves, would you want to take this character-to-be as a stuffed toy? If not, out it goes. Even our villains have to be friendly.”
The boys have had some clangers. Tests showed that “the Jetsons” should’ve been bigger than the Flintstones, but it sank in the wrong time-slots. And their beautifully drawn, carefully researched cartoon venture “Johnny Quest” [sic] has lost them more than $500,000. On the other hand, every cartoon they’ve made is still showing somewhere, and they’ll likely go on forever.
At their best, the cartoons of this golden age have fled the never-never world and settled in at right now—a thinly disguises right now with paws instead of hands and with whisker, antlers or tails. They’ve substituted the wisecracker for the nutcracker and they make a running, jumping commentary on all us comic citizens of right now.

I liked Secret Squirrel. Some of the gadgets were contrived, but Paul Frees’ voice work was terrific. And six minutes, once a week was just the right amount of time to be able to stomach Precious Pupp. The rest of the cartoons? Yawn to blecch, even when viewed with the maudlin mask of nostalgia. Sorry, I’ll take Huck and Quick Draw. They’re still entertaining. And what’s that, Joe? You’re green-lighting Space Ghost because he’ll make a great action figure? That’s the cartoon biz, I guess.

A Cry For Something New

Was Jonny Quest a success?

I’d say so, even though it didn’t become the prime-time juggernaut that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hoped it would. In fact, when it looked certain that the show wouldn’ t rack up huge numbers, let alone win its time-slot, it was switched on the schedule with The Flintstones to give the Modern Stone Age Family (and the huge amount of accompanying merchandise, vitamins and so on) a fighting chance at another season (The plan worked).

But Jonny Quest was a success not only because it lived on in Saturday morning cartoon rerun land, but it eventually spawned new sequel cartoons a few decades later and even recently was reborn with an unfortunate team-up with a decidedly unrealistic cat and mouse.

Joe Barbera was not only a top sketch artist and clever gag writer, he became someone who was tops at pitching and selling cartoon series to skittish and bandwagon-jumping network people. And he was pretty good at selling the sold series to columnists always looking for a way to fill space.

Here’s Joe chatting with the Gettysburg Times in a story published on October 24, 1964; Quest had debuted five weeks earlier. Joe shrewdly pushed Hanna-Barbera when he plugged the company’s cartoons to reporters; a constant positive image in the media could be helpful when he had to go back to the networks with more animated product for them to buy. And the writer is correct in her assessment at the end of the story. Whether people like limited animation or not, the studio kept a lot of people employed who would have been out of work when the Golden Age of cartoons petered out.

“Johnny Quest,” [sic] Which Bowed In Color In September Is Pronounced A Sure Success; Barbera Production
By RUTH E. THOMPSON
“In ‘Jonny Quest’ we have to design planes that are possible, but slightly ahead of what’s really because equipment evolves so fast. And you can’t tell children that last year’s yet is next year’s. They won’t believe it.” They also won’t buy it . . . and it was the licensing and franchising of “Jonny Quest” that had brought the soft-spoken, Brooklyn-born Joseph Barbera back East for a quickie New York visit
BOWED IN COLOR
And you don’t need more proof than that that “Jonny” which bowed in color in September on ABC (Fridays, 7:30 p.m.) is a sure success. But as Barbera spread a circle of prints from “Jonny Quest” around him you felt that mattered so much, he kept talking, thinking in terms of series’ values and audience acceptance. “We’re really using a whole new technique in ‘Quest.’ It’s illustration, and cartooning. We brought some of the best illustrators from around the country for this one.
“Of course the others are doing fine, too. Oh, you like ‘The Flintstones’? So do I.”
“But the story in ‘Quest’ did seem to cry for something new. We have a leading scientist much sought after for consultation and sought out, naturally, by enemies. That’s why the government assigns Race (isn’t he handsome) as a permanent bodyguard. There there’s the doctor’s son, 13-year-old Jonny and his adopted son, Haji [sic], who’s from India. We went one-third over our expected budget research enough to make sure our backgrounds are authentic. Now we can travel around the world as no live company could possibly afford to do . . . and with the good art work you should feel you’re there.”
20 NICE YEARS
Barbera is one-half of the seven-year corporate miracle that is Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1937 [sic] Bill Hanna chucked the engineering and journalism he’d studied for to do something more creative, like being idea man and director for animated cartoons. Joe Barbera chucked the banking and accounting for which he’d studied to draw magazine cartoons. MGM saw him as a animator-writer, team him with Hanna and together they created “Tom and Jerry,” turned off some 125 episodes and won seven Oscars by 1937 [sic] when, after two decades in the same shop and with growing families, they got their pink slips. MGM was getting out of the animated field.
THE BIG IDEA
On went the Bill and our thinking caps. What came out as a goal was television. Back to MGM they went with “the big idea.” Wouldn’t MGM like to consider the new medium? MGM would not.
“So we decided to go into business for ourselves.” The Screen Gems TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures sensed a hot idea and went along with financing and distribution phase.
The work space was nil, the staff numbered three, but the enthusiasm was boundless, and in a short time out came a 15-minute [sic] show “Ruff and Reddy,” still seen in many parts of the world.
SOMETHING NEW
“Well, you see, there was really a need for something new, fresh animations, especially for television. Reruns of old — usually very old — theater cartoons was pretty much it when we got in,” Barbera explains.
“And the more we got into it, the more we found innovations to simply production and add interest.”
Barbera reached for another photo.
“This is the new building. Isn’t it a honey?
“We turn off as much production here in a week as we did at MGM in a year . . . and with no time clocks, no memos and a minimum of supervision. Our units work out the details themselves.
“Do I draw any more?” He smiled. Well, only to the extent that I’ll show an artist what I might have in mind, rather than try to tell him . . . but otherwise it’s up to a unit to do its own work.”
MODERN INVENTION
“Unit,” that seems to be the Hanna-Barbera modern invention to outstrip anything that’s being designed in “Quest.” “You see we feel it’s up to creative people to determine their own working hours. Each unit determines its own deadlines, by what time one phase of a job has to be finished so another can proceed. Everybody works hard, but at times of personal choosing, and it proves to be the times when they produce fastest and best.”
And the “fastest and best” dossier now totals — with this season’s “Jonny Quest” — 13 series in seven years! (“The Flintstones,” “Huckleberry Hound,” “Yogi Bear,” “Quick Draw McGraw,” “Touche Turtle,” among others).
WORSE ON TRIP
And as for Barbera, “Well I never sleep anyway, but it’s worse right now on a trip.” There’s one irony, though. Barbera who turned his back on looking for the creative life has to pay more and more attention to finance. By now some 500 manufacturers produce some 2,500 consumer products with likeness off H-B characters which have grossed something like 120 million dollars. And the Hanna-Barbera share of the take requires an informed eye!
Still he’s taking it all in stride. “Remember it’s the stores that count” . . . and if MGM hadn’t handed out those pink slips to two guys seven years ago, well who knows where 300 other guys might, or might not, be working today.

Hanna-Barbera Action Adventure

Until the networks started bowing to pressure groups that wanted to dictate what every kid should watch on TV, cartoons on Saturday morning meant action-adventure as well as comedy.

Hanna-Barbera was at the forefront of this type of cartoon with the prime time airing of Jonny Quest in 1964. Others followed on Saturday mornings. The only one I really watched was The Herculoids because of the odd collection of characters (my sister, not being impressed with the characters’ names, made fun of Dorno by calling him “Doorknob”). I couldn’t tell you a plot of any of the episodes, to be honest.

Doug Wildey is quoted in a documentary on Jonny Quest that the series was, in his estimation, a failure. Did he expect it to feature the kind of elaborate, posed comic book artwork that could never be duplicated on a TV budget?

Wildey was certainly good at it. So was Alex Toth, who joined the studio to work on Quest. Their impressive presentation art has been all over the internet, and now one of the on-line web auction sites has some of it for sale. Let me repost some of it here.

First off, Jonny Quest. These are credited to Wildey. The “File 0-37” was used for a brief period when the show was in development before it was decided to go back to just “Jonny Quest.”



More artwork. Quest fans may recognise the episodes that used the ideas contained in some of these drawings.



Now, some from The Herculoids by Toth. I presume these were done for the series and not later commissions.



A secret agent show called Danger Plus Two made it to the presentation stage. Here’s Doug Wildey again.



Two more proposed shows. Yankee Doodle Daring is signed by Alex Toth.



And from The Great Undersea Race proposal by Doug Wildey, as well as a second, unidentified piece of art.



You can see the full catalogue by clicking here. There’s some great work by Eyvind Earle at Disney and items that were owned by the late Stan Freberg.