Most normal Gen X Americans born in the 60s just remember Speed Racer as one of the kitschy little icons of their childhood If you were actually into anime, you remember it as the show that spawned all of the negative stereotypes of anime you argued with your parents about
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The show wasn't actually *that* popular in Japan, it also wasn't objectively all that good, and it became a staple of US Saturday morning cartoons for basically random business reasons where they got the foreign license extremely cheaply
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And they made the dub extremely cheaply Three people play almost all the voices Corinne Orr (Trixie) is also all the other women, Peter Fernandez (Speed), who was also the writer and director of the dub, was all the men, Jack Grimes played Sparky and the monkey
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The dub dialogue is extremely stilted and badly synced to the lip flaps It's the origin of the "bad dub memes" where someone rattles through this long sentence without any breaths Fernandez said for each episode they gave him one day to write the script and one day to record
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And the animation of the show itself, although it's not that unusual for a series from the 60s, aged pretty badly Especially since it's a show about racecars Much of the time the Mach 5 is a completely static cel just moving across a background cel
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It's just, it's everything that's supposed to be embarrassing about anime Back in the 90s your whole ongoing battle was to convince people to watch Evangelion or Ghost in the Shell or whatever by assuring them it was nothing at all like Speed Racer
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So while an anime outsider might think that Speed Racer was some kind of natural progression for writer/directors who introduced Ghost in the Shell to a Western audience by ripping it off as a live action movie, it really wasn't, it's the opposite It was a great act of humility
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And that's why it's so inspiring that they didn't fuck with it The movie is extremely true to the tone of the original Speed Racer, when ANYONE ELSE would've tried to give it at least a little bit of the grim and gritty treatment
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The mission statement in the opening scene of the movie, man Young Speed doodling a racecar crash in the margins of his homework and making it into a flipbook Transitioning into a (groundbreaking at the time) cel-shaded CGI scene of him racing a handdrawn car on a doodled track
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Transitioning to the "real life" present day scene with the lovingly rendered "real" CGI race What a clear manifesto
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"Maybe they were cranking out a hand drawn cartoon at, like, 5 frames per second And maybe we're the legendary creators of the Matrix working with millions of dollars and the finest computer rendering algorithms known to humankind But we're all doing the same damn thing"
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That's the amazing thing about the movie In terms of filmmaking it was genuinely as avant-garde and cutting-edge as you can get But they embraced the cornball childish stuff so completely people seriously just didn't notice
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That they really wanted to shed their reputation for pretension and grim and gritty themes after V for Vendetta But that just meant that when people said "I don't get it" they assumed "I don't get it because you're stupid" not "I don't get it because I'm stupid" Damn shame
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