Yabba Dabba Doo!
The Flintstones are often thought of as the moment
that animation in North America transitioned
from being a medium aimed primarily at children
and moved on to the primetime stage.
And while this is partially true,
it wasn't the lovable residents of Bedrock
who truly legitimized how limited animation could
work on a larger scale.
You're probably familiar with this,
even if it's just through cultural osmosis--
the peppy 60s jazz, the beautifully rendered
backgrounds, and the figures that
look like they stepped right out of the globetrotting
big-budget James Bond film series.
And this is all because of a simple reason--
the crew on Jonny Quest weren't your typical workaday animation
hands, they were seasoned comic book illustrators--
but we'll get back to that.
If you're struggling to visualize
what I'm talking about, let's do a direct one to one comparison.
Here's a shot from the opening of Flintstone's, you
can see the drastic difference between how
Flintstone's and Quest opened their episodes.
The Flintstones as a single elongated pan
of Fred Flintstone driving a car for 20 seconds.
The background a simple, There are very few moving elements,
and the visual language of the world
isn't too dissimilar from what we've
seen for other Hanna-Barbera shows like Yogi, Topcat,
or Huckleberry Hound.
It's standard animation drawing-- larger eyes,
larger hands and feet paired with usually
an anthropomorphized element.
Characters have easily identifiable, exaggerated
silhouettes-- just a glance, you know what it is.
It's a cartoon.
The Quest intro has 11 shots in the first 20 seconds--
kid running through a naturalistically
painted and rendered forest, pterodactyl, an explosion,
a panther, and even a futuristic spider monster.
The world is so much more varied.
The visual language is almost neoclassical.
It's people who have studied in figure painting classics--
not the Walt Disney Animation mines in the deepest Burbank.
Look at how integrated the foreground elements
are in the first two shots--
they create visual hierarchy and visual dynamism,
much more than the foreground elements
in The Flintstones opening.
Before we get too lost in the minutia,
let's take a step back and set up some of the facts
so we're on the same page.
If you're familiar with Jonny Quest,
you'll have a pretty good rundown here
and if you're unfamiliar, well, Jonny Quest
is a science fiction adventure animated
show starring a would-be boy adventure
with the quintessentially appropriate surname of Quest.
Created by Doug Wildey, the show ran
for only one season and it's initial run from 1964 to 1965.
However, Jonny Quest was unlike all
of the other limited animation TV shows
that Hanna-Barbera produced during the 60s.
Traditional animation is done by creating
many, many, many drawings that flashed by our eyes
at rapid speeds, usually 24 frames per second.
Limited animation, pioneered by the company Hanna-Barbera,
is the practice of making one drawing in the strategically
altering it so that only a single aspect of it moves,
thus saving loads of time and money.
Basically, the Disney method of producing lavishly created,
extremely detailed, almost photo-real animation was too
expensive to produce on a TV budget--
thus, limited animation.
Today, many animation fans would point to The Flintstones
or Scooby Doo as the quintessential limited
animation television show.
However, while those shows did pioneered the art
form of corner cutting and cost saving measures,
it wasn't until Jonny Quest that the Hanna-Barbera production
team had a stroke of brilliance--
hire comic book illustrators to produce a television show
because they thought in static images.
Think about it-- the comic book is essentially
a movie broken up into single sustaining images that
don't move.
Limited animation is a movie broken up
into more or less single images that kind of move.
Doug Wildey was a comic book artist known primarily
for drawing westerns and war comics.
While Wildey was born and raised in Yonkers, New York,
he spent much of his life in Tucson, Arizona.
While stationed at Naval Air Station base Barbers
Point in Honolulu, Hawaii, Wildey got his start
as a newspaper illustrator.
There, he moved on to a prolific career
illustrating such forgotten classic comics
as Buffalo Bill, Gunsmoke, and Indian Fighter.
From here, Wildey procured work from a fledgling company
called Marvel comics, where he illustrated Journey Into
Unknown Worlds, Marvel Tales, and Strange Tales,
bouncing around from title to title for the next decade.
Wildey would eventually segue into work in animation.
In 1962, he would work alongside comic legend Alex Toth
on a Canadian TV show Space Angel, [INAUDIBLE] program
that was a sister show to cult obsession Clutch Cargo.
If you've never seen this weird thing, do yourself a favor--
give it a watch.
They pioneered an animation technique coined syncrobox,
which basically amounts to using the limited animation
of Hanna-Barbera and then instead
of animating the mouths, they would just
film live action actors talking.
It's pretty surreal.
In working on that show, he discovered
that Hanna-Barbera, a much larger and better paying
company, was located just up the street.
He went in for an informal meeting
to attempt to procure work at that company
and discovered that Joe Barbera shared a common interest
in adventure serials.
By the end of that meeting, Barbera
had asked Wildey if he could design
a show in the style of the radio drama
adventure character Jack Armstrong, which company was
in talks to license.
Wildey then set out building a show that
would draw upon influences like Doctor No and Frankie Daro
movies.
Even from its basic set up, Quest
was completely unlike what was being attempted
in animation at the time.
Its mature storylines, naturalistically-rendered
visual vocabulary, and close to photo real character designs
attracted both children and adults alike.
The perfect example of how mature and distinct Jonny Quest
was compared to his brethren is season one episode 10, Shadow
of the Condor.
It follows Quest's crew who, after the plane is damaged,
are forced to seek refuge in the castle of a German baron.
This baron is eventually revealed to be a World War one
fighter pilot.
The episode climaxes in an aerial version
of The Most Dangerous Game with the Baron attempting
to kill Race Bannon.
This episode would be considered mature by today's standards,
let alone the fact that it premiered on ABC
in September of 1964.
Is every episode of Quest perfect?
No.
It suffers from alternate teams of animators, episodes
being taken away from Wildey, and extremely tight deadlines.
But overall, it's a massive step forward for both the subgenres
of animation, known as limited animation,
and the fight to have animation taken seriously
by mainstream American culture.
The show was eventually canceled after 26 episodes,
the technical strides produced by the show
would have ramifications for decades to come.
The show was rebooted in 1986 with this new series titled
The New Adventures of Jonny Quest,
and then again in 1997 with The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest,
but it's this first series, and the only series overseen
by Wildey, that stands out as the high watermark of narrative
and visual storytelling that this became.
Well, guys, that's it for today's episode.
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Hopefully I'll see you guys in the next video.