Honestly, though, all kidding (and homicidal urges) aside, it is kind of my dad’s fault. He was the one who allowed my brother and I to stay up and watch late night broadcasts of the original 1933 King Kong.
Jeff Thomson
I blame my parents. Isn’t that a wonderful saying? It’s not my fault. They made me the way I am. In one fell swoop, with one four-word statement, I can relieve myself of any or all responsibility. Even better, I can do it in three words: I blame TV. I can become a mass-murdering fiend and wash my hands of the entire affair.
Honestly, though, all kidding (and homicidal urges) aside, it is kind of my dad’s fault. He was the one who allowed my brother and I to stay up and watch late night broadcasts of the original 1933 King Kong. Is it any wonder I turned out so warped?
Then again, maybe it was TV. When I was a kid, we had The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. We had a daytime soap opera about vampires called Dark Shadows. On Sundays at dinner time, no less, we had, in my hometown of Chicago, Family Classics with Frazier Thomas. And what were among these paragons of family entertainment? The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Time Machine, and The Lost World (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Hell, we had The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson.
On Saturday nights – in primetime – we had Creature Features with all the classic monsters. The one from the Black Lagoon was my favorite, although Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, in all his wolfish glory comes in a close second.
And then, as if all that wasn’t quite enough to finish the job, we had Saturday morning cartoons: Roadrunner, Heckle and Jekyll, The Tasmanian Devil, Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny. Kill the freaking Wabbit! What do kids have to watch today? Pokemon? It’s been so long, I’ve lost track.
There’s a reason some of the most frightening and twisted horror movies of all time were created by people from my generation.
Jeff Thomson
My own personal favorite, though, was Jonny Quest. The original, mind you; not the plastic piece of crap “updated” version that came along later. A very young Tim Matheson, who later starred in Animal House, voiced the title role. How cool can you get?
And somehow, after all that, after riding my bike without being trussed up like an American football player (and crashing without going immediately to the ER), after drinking water from the hose, and eating food defrosted on the counter top and stirred with a wooden spoon, after growing up on a steady diet of horror and war movies and western shoot-em-ups and gangster movies, I managed to make it to adulthood with my sanity more or less intact. Afterwards, of course, I went rather far off the rails, but that’s another story for another time.
It may seem strange to some of you out there to be reading a horror review of a kid’s cartoon, but for those who haven’t experienced the deliciously wicked thrill of these stories, let me tell you, there’s a reason some of the most frightening and twisted horror movies of all time were created by people from my generation. I’m not saying this is it, mind you, but the ideas had to come from somewhere, so we may as well begin at the beginning.
I’ve chosen my three favorites: Doctor Zin’s Robot Spy, The Invisible Monster, and The Sea Haunt.
Doctor Fenton Quest is a SCIENTIST. It’s never clear which branch of science he specializes in. Apparently, it’s all of them. Hey, it was the early Sixties, and a cartoon. What do you want? Reality?
He and his son, Jonny, along with the boy’s friend, Hadji and dog, Bandit, are rich as Bezos, living on their own tropical island, with their own private jet, which they use to fly all over the world in search of science-stuff. Race Bannon is their tutor. He’s also the baddest s. o. b. on the planet, capable of kicking the asses of (for example) a behemoth of unspecified oriental descent and his twin pet Komodo dragons. He can fly, scuba dive, drive anything, fire any weapon, and operate a jet pack with expert ease.
Where the boy’s mother is was never made clear. She probably got blown up during an experiment gone horribly wrong. Too bad. So sad. They seem none the worse for wear for her absence.
So anyway, the first story in prospect, Doctor Zin’s Robot Spy, begins when a strange UFO lands in the desert near Doctor Quest’s current laboratory, situated in an undisclosed desert location. It sits there for several long moments, accompanied by spooky music, before the small circular dome atop the craft slowly opens and a large black eyeball peers out, then disappears once more, foreshadowing the scary stuff to follow. We discover that it’s (as the title would suggest) a robot spy, operated by Dr. Quest’s no-goodnik Asian nemesis, Doctor Zin, who wants to steal Quest’s secret disintegrator ray.
Bad stuff follows when the eye sprouts spider legs and begins stalking about the place. Scary stuff if you’re watching it before you’ve even started kindergarten. Scary stuff if you’re watching it several decades later under the influence of a certain herb that happens to be legal in Las Vegas or wherever else you live.
Moving on, the second installment is The Invisible Monster, which I suspect the creators stole directly from one of my favorite all-time SciFi movies, The Forbidden Planet. A friend of Professor Quest is mucking about with matter and anti-matter, somewhere deep in a jungle. Predictably, it all goes terribly wrong, so Quest and Company are called in by the poor, unfortunate, and unquestionably dead friend’s daughter. They find the newly created creature with the aid of jet packs by using bags of paint, which they throw upon its head. Very scary, indeed. It all works out in the end, of course, so let’s move on to my personal favorite, The Sea Haunt.
They are flying along in their airplane, which we discover is actually a precursor of the not-yet invented Harrier. They stumble across a ship that has been declared missing and so naturally, they land upon it, finding it abandoned by everyone except a meat-cleaver wielding oriental cook, who tells them a tale so frightening they decide to stick around and see for themselves, rather than doing the sensible thing and getting the flying fuck out of there. Night falls and a horrifying sea creature slips aboard, bent on but one mission: to destroy the Quest’s aircraft.
How it knows what the strange thing on deck was or that, by destroying it, the humans would be trapped aboard the apparently doomed vessel, is never adequately explained. In fact, they never even try to explain it, which is probably for the best. All hope seems lost, until our intrepid science nerds discover the creature really doesn’t like either bright light or fire. The day is thus saved.
After watching such terror-inducing cartoons, I would then go OUTSIDE to enact the horrors I just witnessed with my friends, who naturally also watched the animated fun. Looking back on it, five-plus decades later, it’s a mystery as to how I survived childhood. Better still, it’s freaking miracle.
Until next time . . .
Jeff Thomson
A fourteen-year veteran of the USCG, Jeff Thomson served as a navigator on four different ships and as SAR Controller at two Group Operations Centers. He is currently retired from his life as an over-the-road truck driver, which was not the most conducive writing environment, and yet, he managed to write the majority of his first novel, a bit of his second, and a chunk of his third, using his steering wheel as a desk. He is now writing full time (on an actual desk), and currently working on the sixth novel in his Guardians of the Apocalypse series.
