Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures / YMMV

Awesome Music: That intro. No matter how highly you regard the series, most fans agree that the intro and the music that goes with it was the best and most memorable thing about the show. Judge for yourself.
Badass Decay: Jessie goes from kicking ass and taking names in the first season, to depending on Jonny to save her every time in the second season.
Base-Breaking Character: Jessie. She had plenty of fans, obviously, such as those who saw her as a kick-ass female character, those who saw her as hot and those who liked her romance with Hadji or Jonny. Others, however, balked at the introduction of a new character to the mix, while others saw her as a Faux Action Girl (her Badass Decay in season two didn't help). It also didn't help that in the very first episode, "Darkest Fathoms", she ends up as a Damsel in Distress, which became the impression many early reviews of the show got of the character, not giving the show a chance to show her badass moments later on in the season.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Just after the end of "Rage's Burning Wheel", the audience in explicably shown a clip of Questworld deleting Saturn (or rather, the file of Saturn). It's really just an excuse to zoom around in 3D (which was groundbreaking at the time.)
Broken Base:
- The fanbase is more or less split between those who preferred the more "realistic" takes on the characters of the first season of the show and the more adventure-oriented second season (which was intended to bring more of a "Classic JQ" flavor to the show and reintroduced characters like Pacha the Peddler, Jade, and perennial JQ villain Dr. Zin). It doesn't help that despite the changes to the show that modernized the original series's jaunts all over the world, it also reintroduced problematic elements like Jessie's Chickification, Hadji's Mystical India tendencies, and the Yellow Peril-inspired Dr. Zin, whom even Doug Wildey didn't like.
- Speaking of which, said season also saw the show's entire nascent Rogues Gallery cleared out over the course of it to make room for more Zin. Opinions have ranged from "throwing the baby out with what can only be arguably called bathwater" to "well, at least they all got decent send-off episodes" to even, rarely, "Dr. Zin deserves to reclaim his rightful place as the only major recurring villain."
- The Questworld gimmick in general. At the time, notably, at least one of the second-season showrunners hated it, which helps explain why that season often saw less Medium Blending. Today, stripping away the Nostalgia Filter, even its apologists will admit it has aged poorly, but opinions among them range from arguing it was impressive by the standards of its time and helped sell the show at a time when it had novelty value to feeling it's regrettable to have to put a mid-90's CGI asterisk next to any recommendation towards modern fans. Its haters on the other hand don't always agree on whether it's just a bad execution of a neat concept or whether it was a bad idea from the start that undermined multiple stories it was attached to by having to clumsily write-in excuses to use it.
Complete Monster:
- "AMOK": James Compton is a former special forces operative thought killed in action but now working as a freelance mercenary for whoever can hire him. Paid by a private party to investigate a hindrance to the drug trade in Borneo, Compton assumes the identity of "Mitchell Stramm" after his party is seemingly wiped out by the native Amok monster, winning his way into the Quest's family's good graces and finding the village that's been disrupting the drug trade. Smugly betraying the Quests at this point, Compton opts to simply massacre every last native man, woman, and child in the village to remove them as an obstacle, gloating that his employers will pay him handsomely for each head he brings back to them, attached to the bodies or not.
- "Rock of Rages" & "General Winter": General Vostok is a frozen-cold ex-KGB terrorist who yearns for a world "free of having to make decisions." Vostok introduces himself icily murdering two treasure hunters to procure a destructive golem with which he attempts to assassinate the President of the Czech Republic, and later attempts to create a flash-freezing superweapon he first tests by flash-freezing a base full of soldiers to death. Vostok strong-arms a scientist friend of Dr. Benton Quest into perfecting the device, and when the scientist chafes, Vostok shoots him dead in front of Quest to hurt him. Vostok appears one last time in the comics where he attempts to convert a nuclear reactor into the world's most potent nuclear weapon, one he spitefully attempts to set off when foiled heedless of all the lives—all of his own men included—he'll waste in the process.
- "Nuclear Netherworld": Von Romme is a Corrupt Corporate Executive extraordinaire who built his company over a uranium mine. Von Romme abuses his own minions; looks the other way when his uranium irradiates the water supply of the local Hopi population; and when a local farmer tries to expose him, Von Romme has him murdered and his death made to look like an accident. Von Romme's true evil comes to light when it's revealed he's selling the uranium to terrorists for them to make nuclear weapons with, as Von Romme stays ambivalent as to whomever gets nuked so long as his bank stays intact.
- "Eclipse": The succubus/vampire known as Elise Lenoir initially appears to be a victim, an innocent young woman on the run from evil men. However, Elise was actually maintaining her youth and beauty by draining the life from beautiful, innocent women, and the man hunting her was trying to avenge his sister when she fell victim to her. Elise murdered the men who tried to tail her, and later mind controlled Hadji into her slave to bring Jessie to her for her food source. When her right-hand man protested about Elise trying to replace him with Hadji, Elise declared he was right and sucked the life from him as well. When her deadline of an eclipse was approaching, Elise abandoned all pretense of charm and subtlety and assumed her monstrous true form to kill everyone around and drain Jessie's life.
- "Diamonds and Jade": Dja'Lang Mukharno is a puppeteer and brother of Kumar who exploits his people's old traditions for personal benefit. Coaxing his weak-willed brother into routinely selling off a rare gem to greedy buyers, Dja'Lang summons a shadow demon to brutally kill the buyers and anyone else in the premises to keep the money and the gem. Dja'Lang attempts to kill the Quest family and their friend Jade alongside the cops in the area when Jade sets Kumar up, and when Kumar loses the gem to the Quest family, Dja'Lang turns the shadow beast on him with full intent to murder him for his failure, laughing that he should have killed him years ago.
Engaging Chevrons: "Quest World log-on. Subject: Jonny Quest, Jesse Bannon, and/or Hadji Singh... Going hot!"
Ethnic Scrappy: The first season's writers actually worked to avert this trope with Hadji, only for him to fall back into it in the second season with the reintroduction of the Mystical India elements of his character. While the first season's portrayal has been criticized for falling into Bollywood Nerd stereotypes, it is noteworthy that the show actually predates the stereotype.
Friendly Fandoms: In the '90s, there was a lot of crossovers between JQTRA fan writers and Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers fan writers. Two of the moderators for the "adult" fan list ("adult" meaning mature themes as well as Rule 34) were also mods on the Ranger list.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- They gave Hadji Hollywood Hacking skills in order to subvert some of the Mystical India sterotypes from the original series. Less than a decade later, India becomes a computing and tech support powerhouse and Hadji inadvertently comes off as yet another stereotypical Bollywood Nerd.
- In "Digital Doublecross", a sleeper virus that Surd had planted in a Questworld VR game that both Jonny and Jessie were taking part in warns the two of them (and by extension, Hadji) that if they either die in the game or try to shut off the game itself from the outside, they will instantly and immediately die in real life. Sound familiar?
- In "Rock of Rages", Bandit is bestowed a lifetime supply of dog treats for his heroism. Come "The Bangalore Falcon" and Bandit is rendered immortal, making it one heck of a lifetime.
Magnificent Bastard: Dr. Zin is the chief enemy of the Quest family and a genius scientist and criminal mastermind. Arranging for a military coup in a country developing a powerful satellite, Zin attempts to blackmail the world with it while simultaneously destroying the Quests. Later faking his death to test his twin daughters, Zin reveals his disappointment while sending in a robot double armed with a bomb to kill the Quests, later relying on a mind control device to trick Jonny and friends into a trap while he controls Dr. Bentham and Race into becoming his tools.
Memetic Mutation: "(Insert action here)... so it is written IN THE BOOK OF RAGE!!!"
Retroactive Recognition: A young Thomas Gibson voices Paul Mornay in the episode "Ghost Quest"
Shipping: Compared to the previous versions of Jonny Quest, this version heats things up a little more than usual.
- There is debate among who deserves to be the Fan-Preferred Couple. Jonny and Jessie for a part of the fandom, Hadji and Jessie are also well-liked, and in the second season, Jessie was interested in Hadji, probably due to the massive amounts of Ship Tease for both ships.
- Apparently the series creators felt that Jessie would be the sort of girl Jonny would fall for when he got to the age where he'd be interested in dating, but the boss of the second season was more interested in Jessie and Hadji.
- Sent up in an episode where Jessie and Jonny had their bodies inhabited by a pair of star-crossed ghosts. They use them to reunite and depart for the afterlife, but not before engaging in a seriously intense kiss that Hadji eventually has to clear his throat to get Jessie and Jonny's attention to break up once they're gone. After some amusing awkwardness, Jonny checks some recording equipment they had set up to investigate the haunting, only to find that only a few minutes of footage had been recorded to account for over an hour of time. Jessie teases him with a drawling, "Yeah. The earth stood still for me, too, Jonny."
- For a while, it was actually possible to get Word of God, at least for the second season. The short version was that they chose to split the difference between those who shipped Jessie with Jonny and those who shipped her with Hadji.^note The shipping wars within the fandom managed to drive some fans into taking a third option: Jessie with neither of them.
- Even Jonny's first voice actor supported the Jonny/Jessie ship.
- Besides all that, some episodes still contained some decent Ho Yay.
Sickeningly Sweet: In "In the Darkness of the Moon", Marie Metier calls Race "mon petit chou," which roughly means "my little sweetie" or "my little cupcake." Yes, Race.
Tear Jerker:
- The ending of "N'dovu's Last Journey".
- The fact that Jonny's worst nightmare is being considered a failure and a disappointment to his father. And this isn't because of Jonny's mistakes either; apparently, deep down, Jonny wonders if his father thinks he's stupid. Poor kid...
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The series manages to qualify as this through the violence alone. There's very few episodes without instances of creatively horrible Family-Unfriendly Violence and Family Unfriendly Deaths, and the Gory Discretion Shots applied—sometimes not even then—do little to actually offset this.

YMMV / Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures

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