Johnny Quest, the old 1960s cartoon with the crazy great art, had The Robot Spy episode. Just recently helping the kid with a school project, I noticed the Soviet Sputnik looks very very similar to Dr. Zin's spidery 1957 Robot Spy in the cartoon. The Space Race between the US and the USSR/Russia was no joke back then, so surely this was related/an influence because a lot of people had heard of Sputnik I bet. I mean Johnny's father is a super scientist helping out the US government and innocents around the world. The robot is an unstoppable alien spy... that is defeated by superior American technology. Kennedy announced in 1961 we were gonna put a man on the moon. And Sputnik was basically a thinly veiled spy machine. Read this: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/news/a28496/how-sputnik-worked/ quote, "On April 15, 1955, the Vechernya Moskva newspaper announced that USSR had established the Inter-agency Commission for Interplanetary Communications with a goal of developing an Earth satellite for weather forecasting by taking photos of the Earth's surface. Translation: a spy satellite."
Yeah, it's possible this influenced this cartoon. Whatcha think - take a look?
Oh, and the Omnidroid from The Incredibles (2004) got influenced by Johnny Quest's Robot no doubt. Black with a red "eye", 4 legs, a circular body:
Speaking of Dr. Zin, while similar in vein to the 007 villains of the same era, he had guest appearances in other shows. Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, etc., says: https://jonnyquest.fandom.com/wiki/Dr._Zin_(disambiguation)
Summary of episode here, but you really should buy the DVD, it's great: https://www.thatmomentin.com/moment-johnny-quest-robot-spy-1964/
https://www.nasa.gov/history/the-decision-to-go-to-the-moon/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/news-sputnik-world-space-week-soviet-union-russia
No comments:
Post a Comment