Jonny Quest - The Complete First Season (1964) makes me feel like a kid again.

I was just short of my ninth birthday when this series premiered on ABC, broadcast at 7:30 p.m., which was in those days still prime time. I didn't get to watch it much, maybe one or two episodes, because we had only one television and it was ruled by Mom and Dad. Luckily pretty soon it was on another network on Saturday mornings and I could get my fill. I loved adventure stories and this was a cracking good one: a kid about my age, his friend who could do all sorts of magic tricks. his father who was a scientist but not geeky, their bodyguard who was a real-truly secret agent, and a cute dog all mixed up with spies, meglomaniacs, monsters, native people, deserted ships, exotic locales...

Much later, when I had a VCR I recorded all the episodes off TNT, but my VCR was going west at the time and the sound was bad on all 26 episodes. Lately we had been watching them--and amazingly, they were uncut, all the fun violence restored, unlike the copies that had been rerun on the networks in earlier years--on Boomerang, which had no commercials but did have interruptions.

So how could I resist the DVD set? Jonny Quest on command, as it were. And the transfers are gorgeous. I do detect some occasional dust on the prints they used, but the color is tremendous, full, brilliant saturation--the ones on Boomerang had looked a bit washed out--sharp edges, good sound considering they were filmed for television in 1964. In fact, they wouldn't have looked half so good on our black and white television, no color notwithstanding.

I know how "Little Rosie" feels in the "Rose is Rose" comic--watching these shows is like being nine years old all over again...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:33:00 PM

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