"A Genre That Never Really Existed" ... But It Should Have

Jackson Publick on Jonny Quest:

For me it’s kind of a prism onto a world that existed before I was born really. My parents had their day pass from the 1964 World’s Fair in their little trinket box and my mother was into the Kennedy Assassination, so I’d learn about these things through my older brother and my parents. When you’re growing up in any decade, the previous decade’s shit is so lame and cruddy, because you’re surrounded by furniture your parents bought 15 years before and you’re thinking oh, that old crap—and then ten or 15 years later you’re thinking ‘I love that old crap!’ The way the seventies are awesome now but growing up in the eighties you hate the seventies and you hate brown cars, and now there’s something awesome about that. But I discovered Jonny Quest through my brother and at the time it was awesome because it looked like a comic book and I was really into comic books, and I wanted cartoons to look like that, a comic book come to life, so it struck a chord with me and stayed with me on that level. But as I grew older and became fascinated with the whole space race period of history it became a symbol of that and it was a genre that never really existed but was so convinced of itself it kind of willed itself into existence—it was this weird hybrid of adventure and sci fi and to some extent the kind of superhero world, so after I did the Tick I still had a lot of superhero crap in me and a lot of ancillary ideas and I realized this nonexistent genre was the perfect venue for all this crap I wanted to make jokes about. It was a wrapping up of all these things I was into—James Bond, Spider-Man, Kennedy era space race exuberance which is dead now, and that’s part of the theme of the show, the faded glory of a time when we looked forward to a goofier but more exciting future that never showed up.

See the full interview online

h/t Geek Monthly Online