Roger Evans writes to thank me for posting his great re-creation of the Jonny Quest titles and to reassure me that no CGI was employed; that every bit of it was done via stop-motion animation. That makes it even more impressive than I thought. He has more info on this amazing creation at his website. He also notes his respect and indebtedness to Doug Wildey.
Doug Wildey, creator of Jonny Quest, is another guy I should write about. Doug was a colorful guy…even more so than the character Dave Stevens based on him in The Rocketeer. Around Hanna-Barbera, there were a lot of brilliant artists and creative talents even if all that artistry and creativity didn't always make its way to the screen. The studio was a mixed blessing for these guys. It gave them steady (for the most part) employment. Veve Risto, a very fine cartoonist who worked for H-B, too often on projects he didn't like, once said to me, "If not for Bill and Joe [meaning Hanna and Barbera], a lot of us [meaning artists, primarily older ones] would have wound up selling tires at Sears [meaning they would not have been drawing anything for anyone]."
But the place had a tendency to beat good people down; to turn them into assembly line workers who were satisfied to come in, do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay and then go home, unconcerned with how it all came out. Doug wasn't one of those. He was feisty. He was confrontational. He was willing to fight and campaign and even fib a little to get the best possible product. He could never quite understand why this was frowned-upon by the folks running the company, Mssrs. Hanna and Barbera included.
Doug had the office next door to mine for a while when he was producing the 1978+ Godzilla cartoon show for Hanna-Barbera. I won't claim it was the best animated series ever done or even in the top ten. But I'm quite sure it was as good as anyone could have done in that studio at that time. I once had to break up a possible fist fight that seemed about to happen between Doug and another H-B producer. Doug was unashamedly stealing all the good artists off this other guy's show and getting them assigned to Godzilla.
An observer of all this later made a comment that Doug was Godzilla in that he really didn't care who he stepped on. I'm sure he came across that way to some but I knew him well enough to know he did care. He just didn't always let that stop him. He felt that The System there stepped on everyone to some extent and that you had to do a little stepping of your own just to not get crushed. I wasn't around when he did Jonny Quest there in 1964 — I was home watching — but I heard enough to know the following: That Doug's style as both an artist and as a combatant was the answer to two questions. One was why that show was so good and the other was why Doug didn't work a lot for H-B.