Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 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 Breaker:
    • Jessie. She had plenty of fans, obviously, such as those who saw her as a kick-ass female character and those who saw her as hot and those who liked her romance with 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.
  • Complete Monster: Elise Lenoior from "Eclipse". Appearing as an innocent young woman on the run from evil men, Elise maintained her youth and beauty by draining the life from beautiful, innocent women. The man hunting her had lost his sister to her years past. 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.
    • James Compton, from "AMOK", 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.
    • Dja'Lang Mukharno, from "Diamonds and Jade", 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.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: Arguably Hadji.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple:
    • Jonny and Jessie for an overwhelming majority of the fandom, although Hadji and Jessie are also well-liked, probably due to 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 were he'd be interested in dating.
    • Definitely 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."
  • Friendly Fandoms: In the 1990's, there was a lot of crossover between JQTRA fan writers and Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers fan writers. Two of the moderators for the "adult" fan list ("adult" meaning mature thems 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 Sim Sim Salabim 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.
  • Memetic Mutation: "(Insert action here)... so it is written IN THE BOOK OF RAGE!!!"
  • Motive Decay: The writers promptly forgot about Rage's original (Tear Jerker and tragic) reason for going insane and becoming a villain, in favor of making him the nigh-immortal leader of a bunch of doomsday cultists.
  • Padding: "Quest World log-on. Subject: Jonny Quest, Jesse Bannon, and/or Hadji Singh... Going hot!"
  • Recycled Script: An unfinished Swat Kats episode called "The Curse of Kataluna" had its script recycled to make the TRA episode "Eclipse".
  • Sickeningly Sweet: Marie Metier calls Race "mon petit chou," which roughly means "my little sweetie" or "my little cupcake." Yes, Race.
  • Unfortunate Implications:
    • Hadji is very much in tune with spiritual things, and can be hooked up to a machine to see the afterlife. Apparently he's magical by virtue of being Indian.
    • The first season tried to rationalize his abilities by having him be able to do exceptional things that were still within the possibilities of one practicing as a yogi (which he was), things like controlled breathing and mild body temperature control. The second season decided to go back to the lines of the original series, and... yeah.

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