Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Go on an action-packed adventure with Jonny Quest


I never watched much of Hanna-Barbera's Jonny Quest when I was a kid — I was a fan of their more intellectual fare, such as Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla and Scooby-Doo1 — but I was compelled to pick up this book for a quarter when I came across it this week. That cover is just too cool.

Jonny Quest and the Lost City was a Durabook published by Modern Promotions in 1972. (Actually, it was published by Modern Promotions — which was a division of Unisystems — under arrangement with Ottenheimer Publishers Inc., which seems really complicated.)

The author was Horace J. Elias, who wrote books based on many Hanna-Barbera shows, including Scooby Doo in the Haunted House, Huckleberry Hound Puts the Fire Out, Yogi Bear and the Bubble Gum Lions, and — I swear I'm not making this up — Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm and The Witch Who Ran Out Of Jizzle.

Jonny Quest and the Lost City packs a lot of story into its 24 pages. There's a super-secret laboratory, a Secret Science Center near Washington, experiments with nuclear broadcast power (wut?), a jamming station in northern Mexico, the lost city of Queraxco, a 40-foot statue, machine gunners, and this guy, a villain named Professor Cosmo Null.


You'll be happy to know that Cosmo Null does not obtain the secret of nuclear broadcast power. Null is handed over to the Mexican authorities, who hopefully did a better job keeping him behind bars than they did with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. Also, we can only hope that Null was issued a prison jumpsuit that fully covered his arms and legs.

Footnote
1. Also, The Funky Phantom.

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