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.
