The author, John Marek, is a writer and CEO of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

I streamed a lot of videos over the past two weeks during my recovery from COVID and associated quarantine. Everything from a surprisingly engaging documentary called “The Pez  Outlaw” to the retro horror film “The Black Phone.” A few days into my sickness, I came across a six-episode Amazon Prime series called “The Rig.” It is a neo-Lovecraftian drama set on an  isolated oil drilling rig in the North Sea. The show does a pretty good job of creating a spooky ambiance on a limited budget, and if the eco-conscious payoff doesn’t quite hit the mark at  least it doesn’t fall back onto the giant monster crab trope.  

In the first episode, the oil rig’s manager mentions the Sargasso Sea as an example of something people once thought was just a myth but turned out to be real. The genuine Sargasso Sea is an area of the Atlantic Ocean where four currents converge, creating a sort of dead space where debris carried on those currents accumulates. Most notably, a brown seaweed called Sargassum creates floating “islands” acres across. If you are an American male between the ages of 60 and 75, however, the very mention of the words “Sargasso Sea” conjures one memory and one memory only, “The Mystery of the Lizard Men.” 

Jonny Quest was initially conceived as a prime-time animated action-adventure series for the 1964 television schedule. Loosely based on a series of popular books featuring a pre-teen  protagonist named Rick Brant, it combined elements of espionage, science fiction and supernatural horror as 10-year-old Jonny, his buddy Hadji, his scientist father and his  bodyguard/tutor Race investigate weird occurrences around the world. It never achieved impressive ratings and was expensive to produce due to its realistic hand-drawn animation, so it was canceled after just one season, a total of 26 episodes.  

I was a few days short of my second birthday when Jonny Quest debuted on Sept. 18, 1964, and barely a toddler when the last episode of the original run aired on March 11, 1965, so I never knew it as a prime-time series. It lived on, however, as a staple of Saturday morning cartoon programming into the early ’70s, and that’s when I became a fan.  

The first episode, perhaps not coincidentally the first one I saw back around 1969, was “The Mystery of the Lizard Men.” It opens in the dark and foreboding Sargasso Sea, where  seaweed-covered derelict ships, “some of them hundreds of years old,” collect as a floating  junkyard. Obviously, that makes no practical sense, but I was 8 and willing to work with it. The “lizard men” who are seen crawling among the wrecks turn out to be **SPOILERS** divers working for an evil scientist who has hidden a ray gun in one of the hulks and plans to use it to shoot down the “man to the moon” rocket which is to be launched from nearby Florida. On a scale of scientific plausibility, that plot ranks somewhere between bad James Bond and good  Scooby-Doo, but, again … 8. 

The other 25 episodes of the original series follow similar plot paths, with Jonny and the gang encountering mummies, werewolves, gargoyles, pterodactyls, pygmies, komodo dragons and an especially prickly WWI flying ace. Some episodes stand alone and others fit into an overarching narrative in which evil scientist Dr. Zin attempts to take over the world. The action on screen was accompanied by a brass-heavy jazz track that is iconic in its own right. 

Two revival series, “The New Adventures of Jonny Quest” in the mid-80s and “The Real  Adventures of Jonny Quest” in the mid-90s added 65 additional episodes to the catalog. However, Quest aficionados generally consider them pale imitations of the original.