If you were born at any point after the year 1955, chances are you’re familiar with Jonny Quest. Not because it was a long running cartoon, however, as the original show aired for exactly one year before being cancelled. No, ratings weren’t low. It was just ridiculously expensive. Go ahead; watch an old rerun of the 1964 Jonny Quest series. Its original soundtrack was performed by a fucking jazz orchestra, and it had detailed artwork unrivaled by any cartoon in its day. It went drastically over its budget in every episode. Hanna-Barbera basically told the animators, “Here’s $100. Go make us another 30 episodes of Top Cat,” only for the animators to come back a few months later explaining, “We may have spent about $1,000,000 per episode on what many will later regard as our magnum opus. Sorry about that, Joe.”

Jonny Quest was basically a science fiction pulp comic come to life (well, animation). It starred titular character Jonny Quest, an 11 year old boy who followed his father Dr. Benton Quest on wild adventures across the world. They were accompanied by Roger “Race” Bannon, their bodyguard and pilot of their private jet, and Dr. Quest’s adopted son Hadji. Oh, and Jonny’s dog Bandit.

Ironically, Jonny was the second most useless character on the show. The most useless was that annoying puppy of his, who blew every stealth mission, fell out of every boat, bit every gun-wielding maniac’s pants, and almost got the whole gang killed on several occasions because Jonny kept going back for him instead of running for his dear precious life. Race was a man you didn’t mess around with, though. He knew judo, and there was never a shortage of barrels for him to throw at you. Hadji was sort of a magical Indian stereotype. He could charm snakes, hypnotize people, levitate, and for some reason wore a turban while claiming to be Hindu (turbans are commonly worn by men of the Sikh faith– a religion that somehow never gets mentioned in movies). Dr. Quest himself was like a mad scientist who the government hired to fight other mad scientists. Practically every evil scientist villain that ever appeared on the show was on old friend of his, which really shows what kind of company he kept in his youth. And I ask you, what kind of man would have a high-tech base hidden in the Florida Keys and a private space station orbiting Earth? A mad man. A mad scientist man.

With world domination, you get egg roll.

Jonny Quest was notorious for its offensive portrayals of non-white characters. Go ahead; go buy the edited DVD box set, and compare those episodes to the unedited, raw racism aired every night on the Boomerang network. It had everything from rabid cultural misconceptions to hollering bushmen. A recurring villain on the show was the infamous Dr. Zin, an evil Chinese mad scientist who wanted to take over the world. It was the 1960s; practically all villains were Chinese in those days. Dr. Zin, Dr. No from the James Bond films, the Mandarin from Iron Man comics, Ming from Flash Gordon, Egg-Fu from Wonder Woman comics, and of course Fu Manchu. Apparently prior to the kung-fu craze of the 1970s, a lot of fiction writers lived in fear that the scary Chinese were going to take over the world and run out all the white people.

Don’t get me wrong, folks. Jonny Quest was a flipping masterpiece. It was Hanna-Barbera’s first attempt at making a serious cartoon, and it was an instant hit. Despite its cancellation, it lingered on TV in rerun form for decades, ultimately leading to two revivals: The New Adventures of Jonny Quest in the 1980s (which introduced Race Bannon’s daughter Jessie), and the darling of my own childhood, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. The Real Adventures was a great show, but had a random mashing of two different animation and storytelling styles, not to mention some of the shittiest 3-D animation I’ve ever seen. You may say, “Oh, but Manic! It was the mid-90s, and they had a TV show’s budget! It was all they could do!” Fuck you; watch a ReBoot episode (which was created two years prior), and say that again.