Mr. Quest

Today while driving around Buffalo in a U-Haul, I tuned in for a while to whatever the ESPN Radio show is that has replaced Tony Cornheiser's show since Cornheiser stepped down. I don't know who the host is now, but he was going on about the fact that he loves the old cartoon show Jonny Quest, and he was lamenting the fact that nearly every other old cartoon has seen some kind of successful revival, but Jonny Quest has not. He even said that he couldn't find anything online about the show, which makes me wonder if he was spelling it "Jonnee Kwesst", since it took me a single search under "Jonny Quest" on Google to turn up some stuff: this and this, for example.

I liked Jonny Quest a lot when I was a kid, although I didn't get to see it often because if I recall correctly, the places I lived didn't air it often. It was just a straight-forward adventure show, without a whole lot of goofy humor stuff. I remember that when there was a short-lived revival some years ago, I was excited because not only was it Jonny Quest returning, but because I worked at Pizza Hut at the time and we had the official tie-in stuff.

(Which, sadly, turned out to be pretty lame. There was what I thought was a nifty-looking Jonny Quest action figure, but it turned out to not be so much an action figure as just a figure: it was not posable. A pretty good example, really, of the crappy toys Pizza Hut always had for its kid's meals. There was also a plastic collectible drinking cup, with a picture of Jonny pointing at, well, you. One of my employees, who was a stereotypical dirty old man, took one look at this cup and said, "I think he wants you to pull his finger." That pretty much killed my excitement.)

Anyhoo, the guy on the radio show wondered why there has never been a JQ movie or something similar, except for that brief revival in the 90s. I suspect that it would be hard to pull off: a show about a bunch of crime-fighters who are all guys, except for one woman? Two of whom are kids? I can just imagine the critics pumping their reviews of such a movie full of speculations of homoeroticism. I mean, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly -- she who no doubt snuggles deep-down into her sheets with Pauline Kael's picture on them after every pretentious review she writes -- would be a veritable fountain of drool at the prospect of writing a review of a Jonny Quest movie full of "Wink wink nudge nudge" innuendos. Probably actually using the words "wink wing nudge nudge".