Gephyrophillia | Watch This Space #164

Originally Posted onn 01/23/2008 by Jeff Harris

As I was watching that video I made (by the way, thanks for the mostly positive feedback), I noticed that nearly every show can still be found somewhere in this country. Aside from Sailor Moon, which Toei foolishly took off the North American market, nearly everything that has aired on Toonami is on DVD, on the air, and online legally. From ThunderCats, Voltron, and Robotech to Dragon Ball Z, ReBoot, and Gundam to the DCAU, Transformers, Zoids, to the modern era shows like Naruto, One Piece, The Batman, and others are everywhere. Some air on other networks. Some are online-exclusives. Some are in video stores. A pair of shows, however, aren't anywhere.

I'm talking about The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and The Powerpuff Girls.

I know there have been best-of compilations of the Girls, and there was a sampler pack of Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, but neither of these shows are found anywhere. They're not streaming online. They're not in your local video stores. And they're not on the air.

Yes, I know that Cartoon Network airs The Powerpuff Girls Movie on a sporadic basis, aired The Fight Before Christmas during the holiday season, and uses the characters infrequently in promos, but the actual stand-alone series has disappeared from view. When I mean stand-alone, I mean, in the listings, you'll see the words Powerpuff Girls in the timeslot, not Cartoon Cartoons or Cartoon Cartoons Top 5, where they've been hiding for a number of years now. Now, granted, they'll probably end up on Boomerang, Cartoon Network City's junkyard and recycling center apparently, by year's end, but I think Powerpuff Girls, at least in the last four or five years, has been put aside, punished for some reason or something. They just never said why the show disappeared.

What exactly were the reasons? A lackluster performance at the box office for the movie? The ill-conceived remarketing of the girls as Bratz-like fashion divas? The show's creator, Craig McCracken, focusing more on Foster's than his original series? Or were they hoping that they could rejuvenate the franchise by making an anime version of the series, which was riddled with problems and not generally viewed positively by those that actually watched it?

On the flipside, while Cartoon Network at least pretends to acknowledge the Powerpuff Girls, they've seemed to completely eradicate the existance of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. You'll see the original Jonny Quest on Boomerang, streaming online, and in video stores as well as parodies and homages everywhere, but when it comes to The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, you'll tend to get a "what's that?" from a lot of people, which is sad. The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest was one of the cornerstones of the creation of the Toonami block. Yeah, ThunderCats and Voltron back on television after a disappearance from the airwaves for almost a decade was a great thing, but even then as it is now, Toonami focused on newer, never-before-seen properties, which RAJQ was at the time. However, Cartoon Network prematurely killed the property. Hanna-Barbera wanted to continue the show without the Questworld CGI elements, which is why one of the final episodes ended with the "death" of Jerimiah Surd, the show's vectorized terrorist, which, oddly, didn't have many CGI scenes in it since they did most of the Questworld scenes in traditional animation. Cartoon Network, in its first real act of pure stupidity, wanted MORE Questworld segments, almost completely ignoring the traditional animators. So, they cancelled the show, reran the latter half of the series to death purposely causing viewer dislike for the series, and, in September 1999, unceremoniously pulling the plug on the series in one of the most memorable segments in Toonami history.

For almost a decade, the series has been languishing in limbo. Hanna-Barbera only exists as a copyright notice. The original Jonny Quest has remained fresh in pop culture, whether it's actually seeing the original on television or looking at their parodies on shows like Freakazoid or Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. The Venture Brothers is one of the sharpest homages to the original, and the upcoming Secret Saturdays is looking to be another great adventure series in the tradition of the original JQ. But The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, the last great Hanna-Barbera action series, has been largely forgotten, as if it was an embarrassment for everyone involved, which it certainly wasn't. The original series is about to be adapted into a new feature film in the light of the success of Transformers, and most likely, a new animated series, based on the film and echoing the original series, will be made. Meanwhile, the Real Adventures will continue to be forgotten by the studios and Cartoon Network. While Powerpuff Girls will likely become availiable in some form or another, the Real Adventures of Jonny Quest is likely going to be gone forever, and that's a damn shame. It's not that often that a truly great American action cartoon not based on a comic book comes along.

*end transmission*

Jeff Harris,
The X Bridge Creator/Webmaster
January 23, 2008