I don’t know if anyone else is enjoying this TV Title Sequence thing I’ve been doing, but I am sure am having fun hunting down this stuff, some of which I haven’t seen or thought about in years. Today’s selection is from one of my Saturday-morning faves when I was a kid, a 1960s-vintage cartoon that continued running (I believe) well into the 1980s: Jonny Quest. If you don’t recall the show, Jonny Quest was just about the perfect series ever created for ten-year-old boys (and a whole lot of girls!). It followed the adventures of the titular character, who is, not surprisingly, about ten or twelve years old, as he travels the world with his father, globally renowned scientist and inventor, Dr. Benton Quest. Along for the ride are Jonny’s friend Hadji (who can be read through a modern lens as an unfortunate stereotype, but in simpler, less-uptight times would’ve been just a damn cool kid to have as a buddy, what with his snake-charming powers and such), the obligatory yappy-dog Bandit for comic relief (which, admittedly, was never terribly funny, even when I was ten), and Dr. Quest’s assistant, driver, bodyguard, sidekick, and regular right-hand man, Race Bannon. (Modern-day po-mo ironists take note of the fact that there are no women in the series and speculate about the true nature of Race and Benton’s relationship, if you get my meaning. I suppose it’s possible they were lovers; I prefer to see them as brothers-in-arms who, in the words of Indiana Jones’ sidekick Short Round, have “no time for love.” The show is, after all, a ten-year-old boy’s vision of the world, as yet uncorrupted by such grown-up things as sexual chemistry.)

The title sequence for the show plays as a montage of greatest hits from previous episodes:

Yeah, that’s great stuff with the jazzy, brassy, jangly-guitary, mid-60s-style music and the whole Kennedy-era sense of derring-do and “science will conquer all” attitude. As you can see from the clip, Jonny Quest covered a lot of territory: fantasy (dinosaurs), horror (the mummy episode), high adventure (the jungle stuff), science fiction (the eyeball/spider robot — which always gave me a major case of The Willies — and the assorted ray-guns, lasers, and blasters), spy thriller, and just plain old two-fisted, rifle-shooting, manly-man action. I know there have been a couple of attempts to revive and update the show — one particularly oddball version in the mid-90s featured Jonny entering a CG virtual reality in every episode, as I recall — but none of them came close to the innocent, pulp-fiction fun of the original. This is one of the very few kiddie cartoons that I’d like to have on DVD…