Get ready to relive your childhood with the first 11 episodes of Speed Racer the Collectors Edition.
--Adam
Speed Racer
Directors: Peter Fernandez
Producers: Not Listed
Writers: Jack Curtis Peter Fernandez Tatsuo Yoshida
Features: Villans Gallery Production notes Merchandise
Characters:
Pops-Jack Curtis
Speed-Peter Fernandez
Genre: Animation
Review:
Speed Racer
I can’t stand Dragonball Z. I don’t care for Pokemon. And I don’t even know what the hell Yo-Gi-Oh is (took me twenty minutes to look it up on the internet just so I could spell it right). You see somewhere down the line, in my opinion, Japanimation got ruined. I think it happened in the last quarter of Akira when it went from street gangs and explosions to a little kid with a big head destroying the world. After that a bunch of dorks thought hey lets smoke a lot of dope and draw crap that doesn’t make sense because there are other dorks out their smoking dope who can’t draw that would love this stuff. And let’s throw in some gratuitous nudity for kicks. It went from cool looking cartoons with good stories and a lot of action to a bunch of fast paced seizure inducing images of weird looking monsters being destroyed by kids with powerful playing cards. Playing cards!!! Seriously who is scared of a kid with a back pack and a deck of UNO cards? Give me the old school stuff any day, like Star Blazers, Golgo 13, and Speed Racer.
Speed Racer, this was the show, along with Star Blazers, that I would race home to see every day. In a way these were my first introduction to serials. Most days ended with a cliffhanger and you just had to watch the next day to see if Speed would make it over the ravine or if the Mach-5 would make it underwater. So believe me when I say I jumped at the chance to review the new DVD.
Speed Racer the Collector’s Edition makes up the first 11 episodes of the series, 5 stories in all, digitally mastered to give the cartoon a better look than it probably did when it first came out. Each one is filled with action, suspense and humor. It was fun and exciting to sit down and watch some old ones I remember and others I didn’t. The show follows the adventures of a high school race car driver named, duh, Speed Racer. Along with his dad, Pops, His girlfriend Trixie and the rest of his family Speed gets into dangerous situations each episode. In fact the cause of most of Speeds woes come from not a villan, but his younger brother Spritle and his monkey Chim Chim (how can you not like a cartoon with a mischievous monkey). Of course everything almost always revolves around the big race. All of the villains, from Ace Duecy to Captain Terror, want to get their hands on Mach-5, a car that resembles something Q from the James Bond films would create. And just like the Bond films the Mach-5 always has the right gadget to get Speed out of a fix. I mean it takes a lot of fore thought to realize mounting buzz saws on the front of the car might come in handy if you ever get off track and find yourself traveling at high speeds through a bamboo field.
The rest of the DVD is not that impressive. It is mostly a bunch of production notes and files on characters. One particularly disappointing feature was the merchandise screen. It is nothing more than a slide show with about 5 items that range from old lunch boxes to toys. I was hoping for a little more depth. I am sure there are more than 5 things out there that have the Speed Racer logo on them. As far as sound features, we were never going to get DTS 5.1 out of an old 60’s cartoon.
Don’t let the features rule whether you buy this or not. If you enjoyed it as a child or even if you missed out and you love adventure, you should defiantly give this disc a chance. And if you have children you could do a lot worse than showing them this great cartoon. They could end up watching some crap that is nothing more than a marketing tool. Then you have to go out and spend your hard earned money on card games that your child will end up playing at a comic book store with some smelly, overweight 30 year old man who still lives with his parents. In the end your broke, your kids a loser and you can’t get it up anymore (just guessing). So do us all a favor before you ruin everyone’s life and buy this DVD.
----Adam