Benton Quest and Race Bannon: TV's First Gay Family?

Boomerang is now showing reruns of Jonny Quest at midnight and I find myself watching Golden Girls reruns on Hallmark or the second airing of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC from 11 to about 11:45, so I can say to myself, “Oh, Jonny Quest is on in 15 minutes anyway, I may as well stay up and see it as long as I’m up.” I absolutely loved this show when it first aired back in the early 60s. I remember it used be on ABC just before The Addams Family—I think. I loathe the new version Cartoon Network had on a few years ago because it looked so cheap. The thing that excited me about Jonny Quest was that despite the fact that the title character was an 11-year-old boy like me (I had to be younger) this was a sophisticated adult show.

First of all, it was on at night! That meant it wasn’t intended for kids. Those cartoons were only on Saturday mornings, unlike the 24-7 accessibility of animation nowadays. And the animation was so realistic, Jonny and his all-male clan looked like real people, not fantasy coloring book figures like the Flintstones or the Jetsons, Hanna-Barbara’s other prime-time family units.

Jonny never had to go to school. There was the occasional admonishment from Race Bannon for him to do his homework or he wouldn’t get to hang glide with Hadji, but then there would be a call from some panicked police chief or fellow scientist for his dad, Dr. Benton Quest to drop everything to rush to India or Pago Pago. They’d all pile in their private jet and head for adventure. I wonder if they ever ran into Josie and the Pussycats. (But that was probably years later.)

There was also the gay subtext of the relationship between Dr. Benton Quest and Race Bannon. Did you notice the sideways glances they cast at each other in the opening credits as if to say “Wait till the kids are asleep then I can show you that new experiment, if you know what I mean”? They always shared a room, sometimes with the boys, too—as in that episode where a tarantula is dropped on Dr. Quest in the middle of the night and Jonny throws a pitcher of water at it. All four are in the same room, each in separate beds of course.

Race did have a brief flirtation with a female spy called Jade and they seemed to know each other from previous international capers. Jonny and Hadji both go “Ewww!” when the two daredevils kissed at the end of an episode. The ABC bigwigs may have dictated a little heterosexual smooching to avoid any suspicion of hanky-panky on the part of the two male leads. Otherwise, Benton and Race were constantly in each other’s company and Race was the “mother” to Jonny and Hadji. Mrs. Quest apparently died at a young age and her surviving husband never mentions female companionship. So this unit was an early example of a same-sex couple, complete with an adopted Third World child (Hadji). Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law, satirized the gay possibilities with Race suing Benton for custody of the boys.

I was watching an episode Thursday night and it was startling because an Asian police lieutenant who has been acting as a double agent against his government dies a horrible death in a car crash. You don’t see such on screen violence in cartoons today—or not in Saturday morning ones anyway. Here was real life and death with consequences. Not like the bullets which bounced off Superman or wounded Daffy Duck but he emerged unscathed. In one cartoon, after being shot by Elmer Fudd, Daffy joked “It’s a good thing I got Blue Cross.”

Trivia note: I discovered that the end-credit footage of angry African natives chasing a hovercraft as it flies into a waiting jet and then throwing spears at the jet as it takes off is not from any Jonny Quest episode. Those are scenes from an earlier version of the show which never aired. That always bothered me because all the other scenes in the credits were from recognized Quest adventures. Mystery solved.

My favorite line. In the episode "The House of the Seven Gargoyles" it's revealed that a gargoyle statue is actually a dwarf in disguise spying on Dr. Quest while he visits Norway. Someone says "It's Norway's greatest acrobatic dwarf!" As if there were hundreds of acrobatic dwarves in Norway.

This has been a Screen Gems presentation.