Jonny Quest -- old and new

I didn't know about these. I just looked them up on youtube. Wow! Just wow! Thanks!

 

Those are great. I laugh out loud at some of the "blat" trumpet notes. I bet a lot of this stuff was just studio musicians sight-reading with very little rehearsal. This is complicated music, so it's a testament to their skills that they could play it this well, particularly in a TV schedule and budget.

 

Thinking back now, wow....I really dug this cartoon back in the day. I was one of those who had to watch it in B&W. Amazing.

 

Was this previous to Johnny Quest? Nice cover. Nudee and everything. That was an amazing stop motion recreation. The monitor lizards, the spider robot, the flying "cups" Wow. Someone spent a lot of time on that! That old Jonny Quest was pretty brutal. Always lots of death. I think it was my favorite cartoon. Yeah, Race Bannon, great name.

Here's a question nostalgia experts, in that introduction, you hear the sound of the laser beam. You heard that sound effect a lot. Usually used for ... laser beams. Anyone have any idea what that sound actually was? I don't. I'm asking.

 

This seems to be a reoccurring theme in the TV business. The first iteration of a show turns out good, is basically spot on, and makes for TV gold. The brain trust gets their hands on said show years later and they try to make lightning strike twice and, almost without fail, end up with a turd. Not even a so-so show, but a real turd. The viewer remembers the first show, and is jazzed about trying the new version, only to be left flat and wondering if the original was really as good as they remember. Or the viewer wonders how the heck could they mess up a good recipe so badly. Some things are best left alone, especially when they were so very good the first time.

 

I believe these are fake covers.

 

Pretty good!

 

I loved the original Jonny Quest. I remember that the opening sequence, shown with the credits, was scary to me. There were giant lizards running or something like that. There were menacing looking animals of some sort, for sure.

It was only on for one season? That amazes me.

I remember that my aunt once pontificated at our dinner table at that time about the new terrible TV programming for kids, which was rotting the minds and morals of our youth. She had never seen the shows, but had read an article about the dangers of certain new TV shows. I enthusiastically blurted out that I loved Jonny Quest. "But....but that is supposed to be the very worst show of all!!!" she gasped.

 

I loved that cartoon when I was a kid. The mechanical one eyed spider gave me the willies.

 

As a little kid, I used to draw that mechanical one eyed spider from Jonny Quest, with various weapons (laser beams, gunshots, etc.) being shot at it, on page after page of paper. My childhood was not particularly intellectual.

 

Awesome - the music tracking to JQ was high energy goodness!

Ranks in my top tier of tv show music.

 

The shoe store never had the cool prize whenever my mom took me to buy shoes.

 

And the music certainly makes it more of a willies inducer.

 

This is very true. The new version of Thunderbirds, done in CG by the people at Weta Digital, is a good example where it seems to me a lot of changes were done solely for the sake of change (like removing the father character, changing the race of the scientist, and dropping Lady Penelope's age by about 20 years). I'm kind of aghast they would tamper this radically with one of the biggest kids' shows in the history of the UK.

Loved Dr. Zin's mechanical robot spy spider! The guy who did the CG did a good job on that.

 

The Hanna-Barbera sound effects library was legendary for its time. They were all made practically using stone knives and bear skins back in those days. My understanding is that the effects guys (generally called "sound editors" or sometimes just "editors" in animation in those days) would go out with portable mono Nagra recorders and one microphone and record all kinds of motors, metal scrapes, wind noises, high-tension power lines, vacuum cleaners, and all kinds of other stuff, then process, mix, combine, speed up, or slow down the tracks to get the desired results.

I know of a pro sound effects mixer in the 1980s who did exhaustive research to determine how the Star Trek sound effects were done in the 1960s, and it was a similar kind of thing. Some were done with primitive organs and synthesizers, using analog tape to slow the results down or speed it up. In many cases, nobody was 100% sure of exactly how they were done and most of the original guys were no longer around. I think the Hanna-Barbera laser beam is about 3 or 4 things combined, done at different speeds and EQ'd heavily. The work they did is incredible, real state-of-the-art stuff done by very imaginative engineers.

Many of the famous H-B sound effects are available from suppliers like Sound Ideas:

http://www.sound-ideas.com/sound-effects/hanna-barbera-sound-effects.html

 

Loved me some Quest! Just what would they have done without Race to save the day!!!! My one surviving LP from my childhood....so intense!!!

 

I have the first season on DVD. That's all I need.

 

I have that collection, it's wonderful stuff.

 

I love Johnny Quest.One of my geeky hobbies is collecting and kitbashing sixth scale action figures.My Race Bannon

 

Oh, I've seen this one around the forums recently.