Is it supposed to be a sort of Death Race scenerio, in which the drivers are basically gladiators?
Hahaha! The Acrobatic car team! That looks soooo stupid. Get stoned and it’s hilarious! 
Speed Racer was my religion as a kid in the early '70s. I did a show and tell report on the Mach 5. What always mesmerized me was the credits on each episode that show the cast in many different early motor/pedal vehicles. Also part of the acid trip. Maybe my first natural acid trip. “What do these vehicles have to do with all this?” is the thing I was thinking at four and five.
Plus I loved how Spritle mimicked Chim Chim in movements. And Speed’s dad could really kick some ass!
It also taught me what “unbeknownst” meant. Every episode with Racer X always introduced him as, unbeknownst to Speed, his older brother! What four year old knows what unbeknownst means anyway? Acid trip of a translation too.
Here’s a clip from “The Trick Race”. Go to 5:55 to see the Car Acrobatic team. Funny and trippy as hell!
That was why my mother banned us from watching it when we were kids. It wasn’t the violence, or the inane plots, it was all the grunting and panting. “It sounds like a bunch of monkeys!!”
Does everyone always talk so fast in these shows, in this excessively declarative manner? It sounds like the actors are just trying to get through the script as quickly as possible, but that the scriptwriters get paid according to the amount of explication they can squeeze in.
I always assumed they just very literally translated the Japanese, and then didn’t really alter the mouth flaps. But that seems backwards, since it’s usually the English translation that has to add stuff.
I never liked Speed Racer. The animation was stiff and I found the stories ludicrous even as a four-year old. The fact that my local station stopped showing Bugs Bunny and other classic Warner Brothers cartoons in favor of this tripe further added to my hatred for the program.
As for the query posed by the OP, Speed Racer is a Japanese cartoon show. Pretty much all of them look like they were made under the influence of some mind-altering substance. (Although, to their credit, the quality of their animation and story-telling has improved considerably since the days of Speed Racer.) In the words of noted social commentator Strongbad, “Japanese cartoons are weird, man.”
Since always, in Japan, AFAIK; not that I can think of any other instance from Japanese animation aimed at kids, but only that if that were the case it would not be in any way remarkable. Don’t assume our cultural/moral standards are universal.
Maybe Speed is a seria killer like Dexter?
It’s worse in some shows than in others, depending on how talented the translators are. They’re trying to make sure that whenever a character’s mouth is moving in the show, there’s a voice to go with it. The problem is, an idea that can be expressed very quickly in one language, might take a lot longer to communicate in another. Imagine, for example, you’re watching a French movie dubbed into English, and a character has the sensation that he’s previously lived the events he’s currently experiencing. In French, he might just say, “Deja vu!” But if you’re translating that into English, it’s going to take a lot more words to get the concept across, and you’ve got to get them across in the amount of screen time it took the French actor to say two words.
This can work both ways. If you were translating a film from English into French, and a character said, “I have the sensation that I’ve previously lived the events I’m currently experiencing!” you’d probably just translate that into, “Deja vu!” But then you’ve got the guy just standing there flapping his lips for a couple of seconds with no sound coming out. Which is why they have all those weird grunts and stuff. It’s padding, so that the dialogue lasts long enough to cover all the lip movements.
To really get a clear idea of this in a Japanese-language context, find a Japanese music video that has been subtitled in English, where the translator is simply translating line-by-line and not attempting to maintain the poetry (basically, a “convenience” translation that is simply letting you know what the song is about). Typically, each English line will remain on screen for the duration of the corresponding sung Japanese line, and a lot of times this means a fairly brief sentence in English remains on screen for much longer than you would expect it would take to sing such a brief sentence:
Japanese:
“nayande’ru karada ga atsukute yubisaki wa kogoeru hodo tsumetai” (26 or 27 syllables)
English:
“My troubled body is hot, my fingertips are frozen” (14 syllables)
[First line of “Kabutomushi” (“Beetle”) by aiko.]
Believe it or not, I’ve never seen any Speed Racer cartoons, and not for lack of watching lots of crappy animation when I was a kid. Apparently by sheer chance, the TV stations where I lived never carried them; surprising if it was as common as people make it sound.
Nevertheless, I would be surprised if I saw Astroboy or Pikachu pick up an assault rifle and start killing dudes.
White cars can’t jump.
Excellent.
A lot of times, but not necessarily all the time–it depends upon any particular translation.
However, because Japanese is syllable-time (and English is stress-timed), I wonder if maybe they’re just trying to make the lips match the pace. In any case, the English I’ve heard in these cartoons so far is bizarrely denatured:
“Re-mem-ber-Speed-Ra-cer-when-you-de-feat-ed-us-at-that-race-in-the-Ba-var-i-an-Alps-well-we-will-re-turn-to-make-you-pay-for-that-just-you-wait-Speed-Ra-cer!”
Do we know for a fact that there was a Japanese sound track for the TV show before the English sound track?
I think I was the only person that liked MTV’s Speed Racer from the early 90’s.
In the early 70’s, Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion, 8th Man, and Prince Planet were all available for viewing on TV stations servicing the Pittsburgh market. Kimba was shown as part of Paul Shannon’s Adventure Time on WTAE channel 4. The others were all shown on WPGH channel 53, which in those days was still a UHF station.
It was kind of a privilege, really, to have been given such an effective crash course in sucktastic Japanese cartoons. Decades later, when people would wax overly enthusiastic over genuinely good shows like Cowboy Bebop, it was nice to be able to say “Look, just because it’s Japanese doesn’t mean it’s good!” and be able to supply specific examples of the suck.
My god I forgot just how bad those were.
“This Secret film has been filmed secretly”.
My dad told me that in the U.S. at one time “Made in Japan” carried the same connotation that “Made in China” has today. That makes sense, because it was only about two decades after the end of the war.