The intro to the show is pretty standard, it's a ZX spectrum rendering of a flight through the Grand Canyon with clips playing on its wall, over scored with an amazing rendition of the Jonny Quest theme song. I have to say, I do miss the original opening where we seen the Quest family on scenic vacations to the safari or amazon doing fairly standard things like: running, swimming, flying on jet packs, and murdering every brown person they see. The new opening is rather bland, aside from a few clips blurred by giant green scan lines we see nothing that sets the tone of the show, nothing to hook a first time viewer, the clips aren't even rather good, in order it's: Jonny falling down a hole a few times, Jonny standing in a boat with Hadji, Doctor Quest talking about something, and glass breaking.
The opening scene, things are going to get tense now! We open on an epic Pirate battle between.. Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark dressed as Nick Fury from Marvel: 1602 fighting
At the Quest Estate.. in Maine, or is that a Church that Doctor Quest happens to live in? Being set 3 years after the original series we have to establish stuff is different, the Quest family no long live on retirement dream Palm Key, no longer live in a swank retro-futuristic bachelor pad kissed with the style of the 1964 New York World's Fair. Doctor Quest, it seems traded all that for Wayne Manor, and also apparently decided trade his "Just for Men" selection too, as he's now sporting black hair and beard instead of his famous red. He's listening to the recounting of the scuba diver, and decides he must know more about this ship. He asks out loud for a search of the "Ivory Web" his table lights up, yes, apparently Wayne Manor was merged with Encom tower. This kind of bugs me. This show takes place 10 YEARS after the original Jonny Quest series, which had Benton talking about how he was assigned to hunt down Nazis after the war.. Now we see him using full on PCs and creating the world of Tron in his spare time (more on this in part 2.)
Anyways, Wayne Manor pulls up all the Wikipedia article on the ship and Quest gets excited. He says he'll take the case! I might at this point like to say Quest apparently no longer works specifically for the government, and neither does Race. He's went from dynamite one man RAND Corp. to a rich man's T.A.P.S. oh, he makes a nice comment about how he'll enjoy the case because he needs to see some sun, I bet he would see sun all the time if he lived somewhere in Florida.. After this we see a pretty good scene setting up Jonny as a hotheaded young man, and Hadji as an Indian escapist wonder, it's pretty good.
The Quest crew heads to Bermuda in their boat and we see Race and Jesse for the first time, no real complaints aside from the shoehorning of an imaginary daughter for Race in whom I suspect was added solely so we can prove Race and Benton ARE COMPLETELY STRAIGHT, or something. It was established early on that this series would have a different look and see that readily with Race, he doesn't look a lick of the supposed 50 and instead looks like Captain America from "The Ultimates" with white hair, same hair cut as well. They also gave him a really bad stereotypical southern accent, which doesn't play well. After adjusting to this we get a some nice looking shots of Quest Bell 1 being lowered into the sea, and some more moments between Jonny, Hadji, and Race. Notice I haven't mentioned much of Jonny and that's because most of the scenes he's in are pretty good.
Sure he looks older, but he doesn't feel as useless or thick as he did in the old series, sure he's still a bit hard headed and easy to anger, but he at least has good dialogue and good interaction with Hadji. Anyways, Jonny and Race are outside Questbell 1 and find the wreck of the ship, perched on a cliff. It's well animated and the designs are pretty good looking, no complaints there. You also get some pretty tense music to set a mood of "something might happen", but that's completely killed with Doctor Quest chiming in through his bluetooth headset "I hope something doesn't happen." and badly foreshadowing something does, the fog comes and SURPRISE! Ghost pirates! they kidnap Doctor and do a good job of sabotaging only the computer systems. I guess when you're dead for 200 years you can spend all your time reading up on how to crack computer systems. I don't know why we only explicitly see Jesse being kidnapped, at first I thought she was left alone but she shows up on the pirate ship in the brig anyways. I don't know why they did this. I can bet if this had been the 1960s series we'd not only have seen her kidnapped but gotten a scene of her being brutally raped.
We cut back to Jonny, Hadji and Race in a pretty tense scene, not much to bitch about, it's actually tense.. so instead I'll bitch about Race's hair, man this character design is stupid. Jonny and Hadji again are the saving points, including a scene where Jonny basically points out the stupid argument that ghosts of Pirates circa Jack Sparrow wouldn't exactly know how to destroy a computer system and then sets sail to find his dear old dad. On his quest he runs into the pirates, who of course aren't really pirates but dicks on a Motorboat in costumes. Doesn't stop them from royally fucking up his day. Now we see Jonny on an Island encountering the fake Pirate Captain, again some good stuff. The character design is nice and the island design is pretty cool too. Really does give a pirate story feel to it.
Jonny frees Doctor Quest after being knocked out or something, it's not really explained, but lo and behold they're on a nice fancy ship from Ye Nowin' Times and Doctor Quest realises that maybe these guys aren't ghosts at all! They find the machine that makes all their great special effects which is labeled "Fog Machine" "Projector" etc. I never understood the logic of these overly elaborate treasure schemes, more often then not it seems like they spent more money on the technology used to protect it than you'd gain from finding the treasure. I know if I was protecting a treasure, I'd spend some money.. I'd spend it on a gun. That seems like a cheaper and quicker alternative than just trying to project people away. Anyways, We see Doctor Quest and Jonny get attacked by the Pirate Captain, this scene is surprisingly gruesome featuring some cool axe throwing and some blood, really more than I was expecting. The pirates are foiled and there ship blows up. Once again the day is saved and the Quest clan is safe to investigate the ship! However, before any investigation is done we have that scene showing the pirates being carted off by a law boat, you know, to show no murderous pirates who kidnapped and attempted to kill the protagonists died. Jonny and Hadji investigate the wreck and all goes well.. Until the water goes cold, and the ship falls off the ledge in a "Oh, but maybe there really is a ghost" scene.
This wasn't really a bad episode per-se, and maybe I'm being too trivial about the changes, I just don't see the point on enforcing the ideas that this is the same show only a few years later when the writers and artists obviously aren't paying attention to the original anyways. Sure, the character designs suck, Race is useless because he can't beat a man to death, and Jesse is the most annoying character ever created.
However good this pilot was, I can only say it's going to get worse from here judging by the teaser for the next episode. Here we see Race Bannon as a young man in 1974, pointing a gun at a terrorist who has a shit loads of nerve gas hidden in the city of Chicago, Race refuses to shoot the terrorist bastard who appears to be set on killing millions instead opting to talk to him, cut to a show of Jesse hacking into the SSI to find a social security number, and I shit you not, The kids going into the world of Tron as if it were rendered with CGI Mego dolls.
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