Jana das Selvas

During the early 80s, Jana aired on Cartoon Express on the USA Network, and having been born in 1978, and thus too young to have seen the series when it originally aired, Cartoon Express is how I came to see this excellent series. It is one of the many cartoons that I watched as a kid that I now wish I could see again, but at this time, it doesn't exist in either VHS or DVD format. This show is about a young woman who was shipwrecked along with her father in the jungles of South America. A Native American warrior named Montaro rescued Jana from drowning, but her father was not found. Now grown up, Jana searches each episode for her father. This was a great show for what it was, and it's a sad thing that Cartoon Network has never picked Jana up to air either on CN itself or on Boomerang. I only hope they do one day, so I can once again experienced this piece of my childhood.

"Jana of the Jungle" premiered on September 9, 1978 as part of the second half of the animated "Godzilla Power Hour" that was part of NBC's Saturday Morning schedule. Jana was an essentially female version of Tarzan which was in fact Hanna-Barbera's version of Sheena:Queen of the Jungle,which was a very excellent series even though it was very short-lived. The story consisted of Jana(voiced by B.J. Ward),who was a young woman that traverses with the animals in the rainforests of South America in search of her lost father who vanished in a boating accident when she was a child. Jana,with her long blond hair,wears a dress made of an unspecificied animal skin and a necklace that acts as a boomerang weapon given to her by her father. Besides her animal friends,which includes Ghost,the albino jaguar,and Tiko the coatimundi(the latter more resembled a Water Opossum),follows her everywhere in case there was trouble in the jungle,and in some situations called on her animal friends to be rescued.

Her human counterparts,Dr. Ben Cooper(Michael Bell),and Montaro(Ted Cassidy),who was a descendant of a lost warrior tribe who was armed with a supernatural weapon known as "The Staff of Power",that can cause earthquake shockwaves when it strikes the ground and can also cause lighting strikes to appear out of nowhere. The weapon that Montaro used was to keep evildoers away as well as save others for certain danger. The backdrop for the jungles of South America was the perfect setting for this series with some of the episodes from what I remembered seeing as a kid in the late-1970's when this came on,were quite impressive,even though the animation was a bit awkward at times.

Out of the 13 episodes that this short-lived series produced,"Jana of the Jungle" was one of the few very Hanna-Barbera produced series that hasn't been seen since its original broadcast. The 13 episodes of this series ran from September 9, 1978 until December 2,1978. Questions that concern this series is this:possibly due to licensing arrangements with the company that owns it(the same company that licenses the Godzilla franchise not to mention network censors and the head of children's programming at NBC who had wanted to trim the dress that Jana was wearing and even since this was a kid's show it had to be trim,not to mention the violent content was eliminated from Saturday Morning cartoons during the 1970's)....The last time any of the original 13 episodes were seen was during the early 1980's when USA Network's Cartoon Express pick up this series as part of its weekday morning and afternoon lineup ofother animated shows. And it hasn't been seen since. I wish Cartoon Network or Boomerang would bring this series back. This was a brilliant series that was short-lived during its run as part of NBC's Saturday Morning schedule. When "Jana of the Jungle" was cancelled on December 2,1978,the show expanded to 90 minutes only this time without Jana or her jungle companions...only to be replaced by repeated episodes of "Jonny Quest" and "Hong Kong Phooey" as part of the new lineup.

The seldom-seen "Jana of the Jungle" remains in my memory as one of Hanna-Barbera's best adventure series, largely due to the work of its co-producer and designer, Doug Wildey.

Wildey, a veteran newspaper-strip and comic book artist/writer, was the person most responsible for the design, style, and story sensibility of the famous (original) "Jonny Quest," and he brought those same qualities to his subsequent series at H-B and other studios (De Patie-Freleng, where he produced their "Planet of the Apes" adaptation, Ken Snyder Productions with "Skyhawks," etc.) His realistically proportioned characters avoided the clichéd "biceps-and-bazooms" style of many comic artists.

Jana, beautiful, brave, kind, intelligent, and capable of remarkable feats of daring; was an excellent reinvention of the "jungle girl" heroine for a modern era. She is in fact the only "jungle girl" who speaks perfect, unbroken English! B.J. Ward's voice performance as Jana was uniformly fine; as was Ted Cassidy (Lurch of TV's "The Addams Family," in one of his last roles) as her Native foster-father, Montaro; adding a dry, parched texture to his bottomless bass voice, giving it an ancient quality in keeping with the deeply etched lines of his face. Dr. Ben Cooper, zoologist voiced by Michael Bell, has not aged so gracefully, resembling a cross between Mark Spitz and Burt Reynolds and definitely "stuck in the seventies," though Bell's voice work was also very good.

Set along the Amazon river in Venezuela, rather than the African setting typical of jungle shows; Jana's stories may seem prosaic to those used to superheroes who can hurl planets into orbit. Battling wildlife poachers, finding a castaway who may or may not be her long-lost father, facing an erupting volcano, confronting a tribe of gigantic warrior women (on the Amazon, where else?), guiding a raftload of nitro downriver to put out an oil-well fire (an uncredited semi-remake of the then-recent John Wayne film "Rooster Cogburn," with Jana as an unlikely surrogate for Katharine Hepburn!), or even having Montaro turn Jana's deadly enemy while delirious from the effects of a tarantula bite.

But it's because Jana and her friends are "only human" and therefore vulnerable, that these stories work. They are not bulletproof; they put their "lives" in jeopardy, and that's where the suspense element comes from. At times the writing did become cartoonish as Jana's boomerang necklace or Montaro's magical staff performed implausible feats ("Cartoon writers" were a bane of Wildey's existence) but in general the scripting was admirably serious-minded for a Saturday morning cartoon.

Jana's animation was unusually lifelike; a live model, actress/dancer Michele Hart, was "rotoscoped" (filmed, then projected on a drawing board and traced, an early form of "motion capture") for many of her scenes, making Jana graceful, natural, and lightly muscular in action. (I've been unable to identify the live-action models for Montaro or Ben Cooper.)

I've been in touch with the Warner Archive folks; they own the Jana series and hope someday to release it, but have said it will need restoration work as the negatives are in poor condition due to less-than-adequate storage. Whenever Jana may make her comeback, I'll be delighted to see her again.