Post by paulpogue on Oct 8, 2008 18:30:17 GMT -8
I’ve been giving this some thought lately, mostly with the release of the live-action Speed Racer DVD, and decided to put it down on electronic paper: What the heck is the appeal of the Speed Racer TV series? (I have tons of thoughts on the recent film as well, but that calls for its own separate essay.) And since I have no life to speak of and few places to publish anymore, SA and K-Box get the fruits of my labors 
.
I say this because of two equal and opposite forces that pull at my brain:
Primo: I cannot for the life of me conceive of why anybody could even sit through an episode of this show, let alone follow it, let alone pay money for it.
Secundus: I am absolutely obsessed with this show and will happily sit through a marathon of it, and have done so since I was 17. I mean, seriously, my lucky charm at my desk is a freaking plastic Mach 4 that I roll back and forth aimlessly whenever I'm nervous, and flip back and forth while making the jump-jack sound when I think nobody's looking. (I'm a movie traitor this way; I have a Mach 5 on the desk too, but the 4 now holds a special place in my heart.)
This isn’t an ironic hipster thing. This isn’t a “so bad it’s good” thing. This is an honest to goddess, I-love-this-show-DESPITE-being-hideous thing.
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I might have actually come to some answers.
Let’s be frank: By any measurable standard, “Speed Racer” SUUUCKS. The animation makes Hanna-Barbera look hyperkinetic. The voice acting squeezes thirteen words into a space designed for three. Speed himself is not in any way hip. He wears an ascot for god’s sake! Significant screen time is given to an audience-identification child (always a bad idea) and a monkey (worse.) Lots of times (like, dozens per episode) someone will freeze for several seconds and go “Ehhhhhh?” Pops Racer is almost a cipher; Mom Racer is nearly nonexistent.
And I can’t even plead nostalgia; I never saw an episode of Speed Racer until 1992, when I was 17 and it aired on MTV – and I didn’t really start watching it in earnest until college. I had already been exposed to Voltron and Robotech and The Castle of Cagliostro and Akira – I knew damn well how good Japanese animation could be, and Speed Racer didn’t stack up. Hell, even Battle of the Planets animated circles around Speed Racer. So I don’t even have the excuse that the original 1960s fans did, since Speed Racer probably WAS revolutionary to them.
So WHY the goddamn obsession?
Well, if it sucks by every measurable standard, then clearly the appeal must be in the INTANGIBLE standards. Because Speed Racer really did have some things going for it that make up for a lot of things.
First up: the powerful Mach 5. Seriously, that thing has to be one of the three or four coolest fucking cars in the history of fictional cars. I’m personally inclined to put it up at the number one spot, except that the Batmobile probably gets it on general principle. But it sure is near the top. I don’t even need to essay on why the Mach 5 is so awesome, because this truth is SELF EVIDENT. (It’s kind of ironic that on most other levels, the show’s designers couldn’t come up with better cars. It’s one thing for the random other cars in the races to look lame and boring; it’s something else entirely for even the X-9 to look sort of lame by comparison. But hell, maybe they thought the X-9 looked awesome.) One of the reasons for the utter failure of so many of the spinoffs, especially the '93 take, was the moronic decision to ditch the Mach 5 design. I even had serious trepidation that the live-action movie would fuck it up when word came out of a Mach 6, but fortunately they found a happy medium to make it work.
Second up: That super catchy theme song, one of the most memorable in TV history. Allegedly written in an afternoon and recorded in one take, voice director Peter Fernandez (the man most responsible for Speed’s success in the States) cranked that one out in a hurry and, amazingly, still beat-matched the original Japanese “Mach-a-go-go” version. (Incidentally, if you’ve never seen the Japanese opening credits, go check ‘em out on YouTube; the song is interesting, and the opening is a full minute longer, and full of awesome stuff like Speed driving through a dinosaur skeleton or jump-jacking over elephants.) The song sounds inoffensive as hell and SHOULD be an artifact of the 1960s, yet it lends itself extremely well to variations from lounge-act takes (from the film soundtrack, of all places) to numerous heavy metal covers.
Thirdly: Racer-X. (“Unknown to Speed, Racer-X is secretly his older brother Rex, who ran away from home years ago” – god, that’s some of my favorite narration of all time right there.) X is awesome. It’s just that simple. (In my other essay about the movie that I’m penning now, I have some thoughts about whether or not the show plays the Racer family as complete morons for not figuring it out, but it’s worth noting that Speed came within a sliver of figuring it out upon first meeting X and probably put it together not long after.) Plus, the superbly classic moment when Speed finally does call X out on it. (I won’t spoil it here if you don’t know, though I’ll probably mention it in the film essay.)
Fourthly: The voice acting. Fernandez, who also voiced both Speed and X, did an incredible job coordinating a small, close-knit cast of four to do virtually all the voices, and he also wrote those rat-tat-tat scripts. (He veered so wildly from the original that it would be a misnomer to call it a “translation.”
All these things, in retrospect, add up to a surprisingly high level of entertainment, no matter how bad the rest of it is.
And now the fun part: After watching a bunch of episodes on Hulu (god’s gift to the internet), as it turns out, the show wasn’t actually THAT bad after all. Its design is an interesting combination of Japanese and American – entire doctoral theses can and probably have been written about how the show reflects what 1960s Japanese thought America was like, and then reverse-filtered once Fernandez scripted what he thought Japanese people thought America was like. Makes your head hurt just thinking about it; I’ll leave it at the observation that it’s a look not quite like anything of its time.
Story and locale-wise, Speed Racer was an astonishing bit of storytelling, especially when you consider what was available to kids in the 1960s. Every episode was another raising of the stakes; every race another exotic locale, whether it be ice caves or racing a volcano. Most adventures included at least a couple of fistfights, if not actual ninjas. And every adventure was DIFFERENT; you never quite knew where Speed Racer was going to go, except that it was gonna be something exciting. Sure, there were repeated images and 4-frame-per-second animation, but none of the stock footage of everyone walking in exactly the same way that dominated the Flinstones and Scooby-Doo. And on those bits when it wandered into Zatoichi-style navel-gazing (“What is it to win without honor?”), it’s so bizarre as to be compelling. Hell, I even loved bits like when the Car Acrobatic Team would stage KKK-like rallies in their secret mountain lairs, raising torches while swearing vengeance on the hated Speed Racer. (These guys took this SERIOUSLY.)
In retrospect, even Speed isn’t as lame as he seems at first glance. Watching “Race Around the World,” I was struck by how Speed was positioned as the Man With No Name, the guy sitting in the corner of the bar that nobody fucked with if they knew the score. (I loved the way he caught a playing card thrown at him from behind and snapped it back to nail the guy’s cigar.) Speed is much, much cooler than we actually think. He really only does three things: He does ninja fighting (and does it really well), he fixes the car, he races the car. Heck, he doesn’t even sleep most nights before races. He is FOCUSED.
As for animation, like I said, it’s better than we think. The editing and shot selection was done with a filmmaker’s eye and not a cheap animator’s; even the non-moving scenes are done in such a way as to create an ongoing, visual story. (This is something that not even the better 1980s American shows could pull off – “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers” are remarkably static in retrospect.) Plus there’s that final shot of the opening credits, which some have said represents the actual invention of Bullet Time, 30 years before it hit live-action. (I can’t actually think of any cartoons that played with the moving-camera-freeze-frame convention in the interim; even Speed Racer didn’t actually use it in the series.) And the races? Surprisingly coherent and compelling in a way I’d forgotten.
And now for the stuff that I think actually raises Speed Racer to classic status: It is absolutely chock-frakking-full of subtext and internal story arcs that are almost imperceptible, and probably were at best only half-intentional on the part of the creators. And yet they’re still genius – Finger and Kane, when they created the Joker, probably didn’t have in mind all the deconstructionist “agent of chaos versus agent of order, dark vs. light” thing that has long dominated Batman/Joker relations, but they probably did instinctively grasp that a killer clown was the logical inverse of a dark knight who did only good.
Same thing with Speed Racer. In a way, he’s the ultimate audience identification character, a wish-fulfillment fantasy on steroids and aimed right at nerds. He’s a teenager who gets to travel the world beating the pants off everybody who thinks they’re better than him; he’s surrounded by a loving, supportive family; he has an awesome girlfriend who is pretty much an equal partner in everything he does; the cops come to HIM when they have a problem that needs solved; he has an older brother he idolizes and a younger brother who idolizes him. (And the older brother is conveniently absent, so he can make up these fantasies about how he must be an awesome secret agent or something, without the real-life conflicts older and younger brothers usually have. And in Speed and X’s case, those secret-agent fantasies are RIGHT.) He even has a dark guardian angel who’ll drop-kick anyone who messes with him.
This is one of the reasons Spritle is actually a tolerable character; he’s not the audience-identification Robin figure, but rather the adoring younger sibling that many of us know what it’s like to have. He is to Speed what Speed is to Rex. (This is one of those unintentional things; they probably just put him in there for laughs. But he still WORKS on this level, and the Wachowski brothers raise this subtext to text with great effect in the movie.)
Speed is, like most nerds, someone who is absolutely consumed by a desire to do only one thing, in his case racing, and everything in his world seems to be constructed to facilitate that desire. And yet he’s not ungrateful; Speed is constantly aware of how much he owes to his enormous family support. Speed Racer is wish-fulfillment taken to its ultimate extreme, everything a nerd wishes he or she could be, even if we only grasp it on a subconscious level.
.I say this because of two equal and opposite forces that pull at my brain:
Primo: I cannot for the life of me conceive of why anybody could even sit through an episode of this show, let alone follow it, let alone pay money for it.
Secundus: I am absolutely obsessed with this show and will happily sit through a marathon of it, and have done so since I was 17. I mean, seriously, my lucky charm at my desk is a freaking plastic Mach 4 that I roll back and forth aimlessly whenever I'm nervous, and flip back and forth while making the jump-jack sound when I think nobody's looking. (I'm a movie traitor this way; I have a Mach 5 on the desk too, but the 4 now holds a special place in my heart.)
This isn’t an ironic hipster thing. This isn’t a “so bad it’s good” thing. This is an honest to goddess, I-love-this-show-DESPITE-being-hideous thing.
I’ve given it a lot of thought and I might have actually come to some answers.
Let’s be frank: By any measurable standard, “Speed Racer” SUUUCKS. The animation makes Hanna-Barbera look hyperkinetic. The voice acting squeezes thirteen words into a space designed for three. Speed himself is not in any way hip. He wears an ascot for god’s sake! Significant screen time is given to an audience-identification child (always a bad idea) and a monkey (worse.) Lots of times (like, dozens per episode) someone will freeze for several seconds and go “Ehhhhhh?” Pops Racer is almost a cipher; Mom Racer is nearly nonexistent.
And I can’t even plead nostalgia; I never saw an episode of Speed Racer until 1992, when I was 17 and it aired on MTV – and I didn’t really start watching it in earnest until college. I had already been exposed to Voltron and Robotech and The Castle of Cagliostro and Akira – I knew damn well how good Japanese animation could be, and Speed Racer didn’t stack up. Hell, even Battle of the Planets animated circles around Speed Racer. So I don’t even have the excuse that the original 1960s fans did, since Speed Racer probably WAS revolutionary to them.
So WHY the goddamn obsession?
Well, if it sucks by every measurable standard, then clearly the appeal must be in the INTANGIBLE standards. Because Speed Racer really did have some things going for it that make up for a lot of things.
First up: the powerful Mach 5. Seriously, that thing has to be one of the three or four coolest fucking cars in the history of fictional cars. I’m personally inclined to put it up at the number one spot, except that the Batmobile probably gets it on general principle. But it sure is near the top. I don’t even need to essay on why the Mach 5 is so awesome, because this truth is SELF EVIDENT. (It’s kind of ironic that on most other levels, the show’s designers couldn’t come up with better cars. It’s one thing for the random other cars in the races to look lame and boring; it’s something else entirely for even the X-9 to look sort of lame by comparison. But hell, maybe they thought the X-9 looked awesome.) One of the reasons for the utter failure of so many of the spinoffs, especially the '93 take, was the moronic decision to ditch the Mach 5 design. I even had serious trepidation that the live-action movie would fuck it up when word came out of a Mach 6, but fortunately they found a happy medium to make it work.
Second up: That super catchy theme song, one of the most memorable in TV history. Allegedly written in an afternoon and recorded in one take, voice director Peter Fernandez (the man most responsible for Speed’s success in the States) cranked that one out in a hurry and, amazingly, still beat-matched the original Japanese “Mach-a-go-go” version. (Incidentally, if you’ve never seen the Japanese opening credits, go check ‘em out on YouTube; the song is interesting, and the opening is a full minute longer, and full of awesome stuff like Speed driving through a dinosaur skeleton or jump-jacking over elephants.) The song sounds inoffensive as hell and SHOULD be an artifact of the 1960s, yet it lends itself extremely well to variations from lounge-act takes (from the film soundtrack, of all places) to numerous heavy metal covers.
Thirdly: Racer-X. (“Unknown to Speed, Racer-X is secretly his older brother Rex, who ran away from home years ago” – god, that’s some of my favorite narration of all time right there.) X is awesome. It’s just that simple. (In my other essay about the movie that I’m penning now, I have some thoughts about whether or not the show plays the Racer family as complete morons for not figuring it out, but it’s worth noting that Speed came within a sliver of figuring it out upon first meeting X and probably put it together not long after.) Plus, the superbly classic moment when Speed finally does call X out on it. (I won’t spoil it here if you don’t know, though I’ll probably mention it in the film essay.)
Fourthly: The voice acting. Fernandez, who also voiced both Speed and X, did an incredible job coordinating a small, close-knit cast of four to do virtually all the voices, and he also wrote those rat-tat-tat scripts. (He veered so wildly from the original that it would be a misnomer to call it a “translation.”
All these things, in retrospect, add up to a surprisingly high level of entertainment, no matter how bad the rest of it is.
And now the fun part: After watching a bunch of episodes on Hulu (god’s gift to the internet), as it turns out, the show wasn’t actually THAT bad after all. Its design is an interesting combination of Japanese and American – entire doctoral theses can and probably have been written about how the show reflects what 1960s Japanese thought America was like, and then reverse-filtered once Fernandez scripted what he thought Japanese people thought America was like. Makes your head hurt just thinking about it; I’ll leave it at the observation that it’s a look not quite like anything of its time.
Story and locale-wise, Speed Racer was an astonishing bit of storytelling, especially when you consider what was available to kids in the 1960s. Every episode was another raising of the stakes; every race another exotic locale, whether it be ice caves or racing a volcano. Most adventures included at least a couple of fistfights, if not actual ninjas. And every adventure was DIFFERENT; you never quite knew where Speed Racer was going to go, except that it was gonna be something exciting. Sure, there were repeated images and 4-frame-per-second animation, but none of the stock footage of everyone walking in exactly the same way that dominated the Flinstones and Scooby-Doo. And on those bits when it wandered into Zatoichi-style navel-gazing (“What is it to win without honor?”), it’s so bizarre as to be compelling. Hell, I even loved bits like when the Car Acrobatic Team would stage KKK-like rallies in their secret mountain lairs, raising torches while swearing vengeance on the hated Speed Racer. (These guys took this SERIOUSLY.)
In retrospect, even Speed isn’t as lame as he seems at first glance. Watching “Race Around the World,” I was struck by how Speed was positioned as the Man With No Name, the guy sitting in the corner of the bar that nobody fucked with if they knew the score. (I loved the way he caught a playing card thrown at him from behind and snapped it back to nail the guy’s cigar.) Speed is much, much cooler than we actually think. He really only does three things: He does ninja fighting (and does it really well), he fixes the car, he races the car. Heck, he doesn’t even sleep most nights before races. He is FOCUSED.
As for animation, like I said, it’s better than we think. The editing and shot selection was done with a filmmaker’s eye and not a cheap animator’s; even the non-moving scenes are done in such a way as to create an ongoing, visual story. (This is something that not even the better 1980s American shows could pull off – “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers” are remarkably static in retrospect.) Plus there’s that final shot of the opening credits, which some have said represents the actual invention of Bullet Time, 30 years before it hit live-action. (I can’t actually think of any cartoons that played with the moving-camera-freeze-frame convention in the interim; even Speed Racer didn’t actually use it in the series.) And the races? Surprisingly coherent and compelling in a way I’d forgotten.
And now for the stuff that I think actually raises Speed Racer to classic status: It is absolutely chock-frakking-full of subtext and internal story arcs that are almost imperceptible, and probably were at best only half-intentional on the part of the creators. And yet they’re still genius – Finger and Kane, when they created the Joker, probably didn’t have in mind all the deconstructionist “agent of chaos versus agent of order, dark vs. light” thing that has long dominated Batman/Joker relations, but they probably did instinctively grasp that a killer clown was the logical inverse of a dark knight who did only good.
Same thing with Speed Racer. In a way, he’s the ultimate audience identification character, a wish-fulfillment fantasy on steroids and aimed right at nerds. He’s a teenager who gets to travel the world beating the pants off everybody who thinks they’re better than him; he’s surrounded by a loving, supportive family; he has an awesome girlfriend who is pretty much an equal partner in everything he does; the cops come to HIM when they have a problem that needs solved; he has an older brother he idolizes and a younger brother who idolizes him. (And the older brother is conveniently absent, so he can make up these fantasies about how he must be an awesome secret agent or something, without the real-life conflicts older and younger brothers usually have. And in Speed and X’s case, those secret-agent fantasies are RIGHT.) He even has a dark guardian angel who’ll drop-kick anyone who messes with him.
This is one of the reasons Spritle is actually a tolerable character; he’s not the audience-identification Robin figure, but rather the adoring younger sibling that many of us know what it’s like to have. He is to Speed what Speed is to Rex. (This is one of those unintentional things; they probably just put him in there for laughs. But he still WORKS on this level, and the Wachowski brothers raise this subtext to text with great effect in the movie.)
Speed is, like most nerds, someone who is absolutely consumed by a desire to do only one thing, in his case racing, and everything in his world seems to be constructed to facilitate that desire. And yet he’s not ungrateful; Speed is constantly aware of how much he owes to his enormous family support. Speed Racer is wish-fulfillment taken to its ultimate extreme, everything a nerd wishes he or she could be, even if we only grasp it on a subconscious level.