The Music of Jonny Quest

One of the greatest, perhaps THE greatest, action adventure cartoons is "The Adventures of Jonny Quest".

Doug Wildey, working for Hanna-Barbera, created a mature, stylish series that is as thrilling now as when it first aired in 1964. The series is notable for many reasons: the incredible voice over work, the well-rounded characters, exotic locations (drawing Calcutta costs as much as drawing a generic Southern California mountainside or cityscape), the imaginative stories featuring robot-spiders, yetis, mummies, and lizard men.

One of the best things about Jonny Quest is composer Hoyt Curtain's incredible jazz-soaked music. If you watched Saturday morning cartoons in the last 50 years, you know the Jonny Quest theme. The incidental music, which producers Hanna-Barbera often chopped up and tracked into other adventure cartoons they produced, is still thrilling.

One of my most favorite Curtain/Quest pieces of music, with those amazing drumbeats accentuated by horn blasts, can be found at the 1:20 to 2:26 mark below. Another fun piece starts at 4:20 to 5:52.

We can't talk about Quest music without mentioning the amazing, thrill a minute main title theme which just screams "adventure!".

Someone Had To Ask: Why, Japan, Why?

I believe that title says it all. Check out 20 sec to 45 sec.

You can watch the rest, the most bizarre thing might be the cup noodles/Tabasco/kabuki-

diapered-demons vignette which would have David Lynch scratching his head in a wtf manner.

What's on TV Today?

I got up at my normal time of oh-dark-thirty, but since it's Saturday, I'm off. So I tuned into over the air station Heroes & Icons, and The Green Hornet TV series was on.  GH and Kato were in the Black Beauty chasing some bad guys in an armored car down dusty studio back lot roads.

When they cut to Green Hornet and Kato inside Black Beauty, and you see Kato driving and GH in the backseat, it really hit me hard for some reason: the Green Hornet is a superhero who has a chauffeur. A. Chauffeur.   What. An. Asshole. Batman didn't sit in the backseat and have Alfred or Robin drive him around Gotham looking for supervillains and all-night Krispy Kreme stores. Green Arrow (while he was still a Batman ripoff in his early years) always had Speedy, his Robin-esque sidekick, sit beside him in the Arrow Car.  Hell, Hutch never sat in the back of the Grand Torino while Starsky tore down Bay City's mean streets chasing after the crooks and vampires (the John Saxon episode).  

But the Green fucking Hornet has got to have a dude chauffeur his wealthy crime-fighting buns around town. And an Asian dude at that.

I also now wonder if Kato was from Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump's "Djhina."