Toronto Star Review

The following appeared in the Toronto Star. The citation is Mietkiewicz, Henry (1996-08-28). "Animated fool's gold on YTV New series feature cartoons that try to capitalize on fairly recent fads". Toronto Star p. B1. Only the Quest portion is reproduced.

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Only slightly better is The Real Adventures Of Jonny Quest, shown Monday through Thursday at 5 p.m. and Saturdays at 10 a.m.

Poor Jonny still hasn't received the treatment he deserves. In the early '60s, he was dumped by the Hanna-Barbera studio into the cartoon wasteland of Saturday morning, where he picked up nothing more than a cult audience.

What fans loved was the fact that Jonny, his explorer dad, his brainy pal Hadji and his cute bulldog Bandit were worlds away from shows featuring funny animals in eight-minute romps.

Here were adventurers, drawn in a reasonably realistic style, who tramped around the world in half-hour thrillers that seemed like a rough, early draft of the Indiana Jones stories.

Jonny's following may have been small, but Hanna-Barbera has finally acknowledged it as a winner. Unfortunately, swashbuckling realism has been replaced by facile plots heavily laced with jarring science fiction and incongruous computer animation.

Now the band of heroes not only circles the globe but taps into QuestWorld, a poorly explained techno-gimmick that somehow lets them traverse galaxies in their thirst for excitement.

As is often the case with Hanna-Barbera shows, the classical animation is flat and textureless, with minimal characterization, unnaturally stiff movement and poor execution of shading and shadow. The computer animation sure looks spiffy, though.

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