Doug Widley's 1964 Hanna-Barbera animated series Jonny Quest ran for just 26 episodes, but to Gen-Xers it might seem like a lot more. Thanks to a series of sweet, sweet syndication deals, along with clever remixing and repackaging of the company's shows from the 1960s and 1970s, Hanna-Barbera's cartoons have remained in reruns for decades, allowing new generations to grow up watching it. "Scooby-doo, where are you?" "The Flintstones" and, "Jabberjaw." For kids of the 1980s, not a Saturday went by without a few Hanna-Barbera shows making their way into our eyeballs, often quite by accident.

Jonny Quest always seemed to make its way into my generation's cartoon rotation, and many viewers my age loved the flashy, punchy animation, thick-line drawing style, and stock "laser" sound effects. The premise was the stuff of boy adventure novels: Johnny Quest (Tim Matheson) was an 11-year-old prodigy who was skilled in martial arts, weaponry and diving. He was the son of Dr. Benton Quest (Don Messick), a freelance scientist who was often employed by the US government investigating unusual acts of high-tech malfeasance.

Johnny's mother, meanwhile, had died, and his living guardian was Race Bannon (Mike Rhode). However, there is nothing to indicate that Dr. Quest and Road were boyfriends. Johnny's 11-year-old brother Hadji (Danny Bravo) and his pet dog Bandit (also Messick) joined in the adventures. The Quest family lives and works outside of Florida. Their nemesis, Dr. Zin, was voiced by Vic Perrin, perhaps best known as the opening narrator of The Outer Limits.

"Jonny Quest" debuted in September 1964 and ran weekly until March 1965 when it was cancelled. The series did well with critics and even reached a fairly high rating. Hanna-Barbera eventually pulled the plug on the series because, well, it was too expensive to make.

Like many shows before it, "Jonny Quest" didn't find a huge audience until it was in syndication. It often came packaged with other Hanna-Barbera shows (kids of the 80s can tell you that reruns of the show aired amid giant blocks of animation), so it was watched over and over again for two decades straight. "Jonny Quest" also had the distinction of airing reruns on ABC, CBS and NBC in its lifetime. Several other shows were broadcast on all three networks.

Jonny Quest took much of its visual cues from Milton Cunniff's popular comic adventure newspaper Terry and the Pirates, with Doug Widley adding high-tech gadgets like speedboats and airplanes. Back in 1986, Widley was interviewed for "Johnny Quest" (an interview that has been saved to the Jonny Quest fan site.) and revealed that he had originally been hired by Hanna-Barbera to design characters for a TV adaptation of the radio drama Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy. However, that project changed and mutated during development, as Hanna-Barbera was unable to secure the rights to Jack Armstrong's character. From there, Widley turned the character into Jonny Quest and a legend was born. Initially, Hanna-Barbera was reluctant to credit Widley, but eventually relented.

Actual budget figures for a typical episode of "Jonny Quest" aren't easy to come by, but it should be remembered that Hanna-Barbera tried to make a bold attempt to work on the cheap. Indeed, many of Hanna-Barbera's characters were designed in such a way that they would take less time to animate. Most of Hanna-Barbera's characters are seen at a 3/4 angle, meaning they can look to the side or right to the camera, depending only on their eyes. Think Fred Flintstone. This design ethos allowed for a type of limited animation that was cheaper and faster to produce. That allowed Hanna-Barbera to stick to a weekly TV schedule, something most animation studios couldn't do.

Jonny Quest, being more visually rich, probably took too much money to make and too much time to animate. Perhaps unable to keep up with Hanna-Barbera's rigor (and budget), "Johnny Quest" was canned.

Thanks to endless reruns, "Jonny Quest" has remained in the pop consciousness for years, and interest in the character has remained high. Indeed, in 1986, Hanna-Barbera attempted to revive the character with the animated series The New Adventures of Jonny Quest. Scott Manville played the eponymous character, and Don Messick returned as Doctor Quest and the Bandit. This new series was originally intended to be a sequel series with an adult Jonny Quest as the main character, but the studio pushed it back into a reboot. That version, however, only lasted 13 episodes.

A decade later, in 1996, Hanna-Barbera tried again with The True Adventures of Jonny Quest, which added even more high-tech — as well as a "brighter" tone — to the young lad's adventures. Also, Johnny was under the age of 14. True Adventures was grittier and used high-tech computer animation, with JD Roth playing Johnny. It aired on Cartoon Network and was the most successful Jonny Quest show to date, running for 52 episodes spread over two seasons.

The live-action Jonny Quest movie has been stuck in development hell for more than a decade, with about a dozen directors attached to the project. There was a version with Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron in 2009. Robert Rodriguez was once rumored to be working on a Johnny Quest movie.and Chris McKay was all set to direct the 2018 Johnny Quest movie. There's no script and nothing has been greenlit, so we'll have to wait and see if that movie ever gets made.

Those involved in the film had better hurry, though; the people who still know about "Johnny Quest" are now middle-aged or older.