I’m sure I’ve seen every episode of the Speed Racer series from the 60’s.
On top of the impossibility of a race car that jumps, has saw blades, and can go under water, the plots were extremely bizarre:
International spies infiltrating auto racing, acrobatic drivers, a car so fast you need to be sprayed in the face with some kind of nerve gas, a mammoth race car the length of a freight train made out of gold. Races that go through an active volcano, races you have to have a pineapple to win. Good lord this is some fucked up shit.
I was only about 7 or 8 when this came on in the 60’s. Even then I knew that mammoth car thing was completely insane, even for a cartoon.
What kind of acid trip were these people on when they made this stuff?
The thing is, you don’t need drugs. Just access to a male kid’s imagination. Just hire a 10 year old boy and say, “What would you think would be cool?” “A car! With sawblades! That can JUMP!” Etc…
I was younger than that when the show came on in 1967. I thought the car was cool as hell, but even at that wee age I thought the plots were mighty strange.
I had been to real auto races with my folks and knew there was no racing through volcanos and nobody was allowed to enter a freight train made of gold in the race.
I dunno, we’re talking about the land of Godzilla vs Mothra. Heck they making computer games that feature snowboard races held on floating chunks of ice that broke off the polar ice cap, which, let’s face it, would be brutally cool IRL.
I’ve only seen a single episode of Speed Racer. He was chasing after some bad guy in an African mask (I think) and at some point Speed grabs a submachine guy and shoots a whole bunch of the guy’s henchman.
I thought to myself: “Since when are you allowed to murder a bunch of bad guys in a kid’s cartoon?”
It’s hard to say, but Speed Racer was based on a manga, or comic book series.
In Japan, there is a vast number of series, and the market is very competitive. Many grown-ups read comics when commuting to work, and a majority of kids do.
Comic magazines have so many pages that they look like small phonebooks, and many are published weekly. The artwork is usually quickly and simply drawn, in black-and white and often using pre-made backgrounds, speech bubbles, explosion effects and so on. This is a consequence of the fact that the artists are expected to turn in many more pages than is the case with most Western comics. To our eyes, they often appear rushed and somewhat sketch-like, though typically by a skilled hand.
The large amount of stories produced means that when creators are pushed by their editors to come up with ideas that seem original and refreshing, they may be tempted to go for something surreal or bizarre, simply to avoid copying some other popular comic or repeating themselves. In a time when racing comics where popular, like the late sixties, a more realistic racing comic may have been considered old hat by a jaded public.
