JONNY QUEST VS. THE CYBER INSECTS (1997)

 

 

  The franchise JONNY QUEST presents a more complicated case, since it went though more iterations.  The original 1964-65 teleseries appeared during what some might call the last “bad old days” of American pulp entertainment, before political correctness took hold in the 1970s.  As I said before, at no time was QUEST specifically about racial concepts as was Fu Manchu.  Rather, QUEST was the embodiment of boys’ adventure fiction.  This meant that the titular hero Jonny and his entourage—father Benton, older companion Race, same-age buddy Hadji and dog Bandit—were forever bouncing around the globe having harrowing exploits in every clime that suggested exotic allure.  Of the four humans in the entourage, only the East Indian boy Hadji was “non-white,” though happily the animators were foresighted enough to make Hadji sound like a real boy rather than exclusively an exotic stereotype.  I don’t know that any societal watchdogs of the period protested when the mostly-white Quest-group had run-ins with marginalized nonwhite peoples in episodes like “Pursuit of the Pohos” or “A Small Matter of Pygmies.”  In that era, the watchdogs were more concerned with the “monkey-see, monkey-do” effects of fictional violence. However, though the original 1960s series remained popular in televised reruns for many years, political correctness made it unlikely for the next two incarnations of the franchise to show new versions of the Quests beating up on pygmies.  The Asian evildoer Doctor Zin, the Quests’ only recurring antagonist— who was essentially the show’s tip of the hat to Fu Manchu—did survive, but as JONNY QUEST VS. THE CYBER INSECTS shows, he did so only in what might considered a “deracinated” form.

 

CYBER, the last telecartoon produced from the QUEST franchise, takes its cue from the previous teleseries from the 1996 reboot-series, noteworthy for introducing a girl-character to the Quest-team: Race Bannon’s teenaged daughter Jessie.  In contrast to the JOE film, both the animation and the story-pacing of CYBER is sluggish and unremarkable, except for one sequence.  The opening of the telemovie shows Jonny and Hadji dashing pell-mell through a thick jungle, chased by numerous hostile-looking  tribesmen, many of whom wear huge masks suggestive of those worn by native African tribes. The boys dodge their pursuers, clamber past the fence of a deserted village, and try to steal a brilliant sapphire from the hands of a giant pagan idol—

 

Then the filmmakers—who seem to have had some notion of recreating the “bad old days” of the original series—pull the rug out from under the viewer.  It’s revealed that the suspenseful chase was not a matter of literal peril, but that the two boys were undergoing a test of manhood in accordance with the culture of the tribesmen.  Despite the quasi-African look of the masks, the natives turn out to be an unspecified tribe of South Americans, and the ritual is taking place under the scrutiny of Jonny’s father Benton and guardian Race.

 

This inversion of old pulp-clichés is not bad in itself.  It’s only bad when it seems forced and obligatory, as I showed earlier in my review of the CONAN THE ADVENTURER cartoon, where a tribe of black African cannibals created by Robert E. Howard are predictably rendered as white guys.  In similar fashion CYBER dispels the boogieman of alleged racism by depicting the tribesmen as predictably wise and beneficent.  However, this is a petty crime next to the film’s rewriting of Jonny Quest, for he fails his trial of manhood due to being an irresponsible hothead. “Classic Jonny” was indeed impulsive, but more often than not, he showed good judgment in perilous situations.

 

Again, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with making the hero a “square peg” that must be hammered into society’s round hole for the greater good.  Lt. Falcon in the aforementioned JOE movie gets some modest mileage out of the trope. But as CYBER chugs along—revealing the insidious Doctor Zin’s plan to conquer the world with the help of giant bio-engineered insects— the script doesn’t have Jonny reach his new understanding of “team spirit” with any insight.  He just keeps making impulsive mistakes until at one point, he finally gets it together.  The other characters—who were also simple but vivid types in the classic version—lack any of their old vivacity, with the script giving none of them any new tweaks or developments.

 

I said that Doctor Zin may have been intentionally “deracinated.”  By that I meant that while his original incarnation is clearly Asian, in CYBER Zin looks like a cadaverous old man, and I'm not sure one would note his Asian heritage if one had never seen the character before.  It occurred to me that it’s a little ironic that in his last (thus far) cartoon appearance, Zin is associated with insect-monsters, much as Fu Manchu was associated with insidious creepy-crawlies like scorpions and centipedes.  However, in contrast to the way G.I. JOE makes occasional references to matters Eastern, there’s no strong evidence that CYBER’s producers had recalled this facet of  “oriental evil,” so it may just be a fortuitous coincidence.

 

The film ends with Jonny and Hadji finally completing their South American trial by fire, insisting once again on the value of cooperation with mind-numbing insistence.  As a last fillip in the direction of political correctness, though nothing has been said about the trial being a guys-only thing, Jonny invites Jessie to share in the triumph, in order to perpetuate warm fuzzies all around.