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Speed Racer takes a victory lap

BY FRANK LOVECE | Special to Newsday

May 9, 2008

It must have been the theme song. When that whirring, whirring, whirring prelude came on the TV set in those afternoon-cartoon days of 1967, when there wasn't much else on for your average 10-year-old, you knew the bouncy strains of some clean-cut guitar band was about to draw you in: "Here he comes/Here comes Speed Racer/He's a demon on wheels...."

It did have a look, this 52-episode, redubbed Japanese series based on the manga (Japanese comic book) "Mach GoGoGo." (Teenage race car driver Speed Racer was originally G" Mifune. G" figure.) All we'd seen like it were "Astro Boy," the American sui generis of what we didn't know at the time was called anime, plus the subsequent robot series "Gigantor" and "Tobor the 8th Man," the unmemorable "Marine Boy" and "Kimba the White Lion."

But Speed wasn't a robot, or able to breathe underwater, or a lion. He was a teenager, the next step in our young selves' development. Sure, he had a gadget-filled car, like James Bond. But he had to use the driving skills he'd earned himself - nobody gave him that. And unlike anyone else until Fred on "Scooby-Doo," Speed had a girlfriend and wore an ascot. What with that and his cool car, the Mach 5, heck - he was the Tony Stark of 10-year-olds.

Speed's come back for a few more laps around the TV, with the 13-episode dud "The New Adventures of Speed Racer" (Syndicated, 1993-94) and the 12-episode "Speed Racer Y2K" (Nickelodeon, 2002). There are even toy tie-in webisodes "Speed Racer Lives." And now, drafting in the wake of new movie, there's a Nicktoons Network series, "Speed Racer: The Next Generation," which premiered last week; a DVD of the feature-length first episode came out earlier this week.

"Speed Racer," which opens today, was reviewed in yesterday's Newsday. Here's part of Rafer Guzmán's three-star review. For the full review, go to Newsday.com/movies.

Somewhere between a Mario Bros. video game and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Speed Racer" is one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years.

With its supersaturated palette and slick surfaces, "Speed Racer" looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular - and spectacularly strange - viewing experience.

Younger viewers probably won't remember the movie's source material, the Japanese cartoon that debuted in America in 1967. The stiffly drawn characters are here made flesh.

Here's what some other critics had to say:

"Speed Racer" doesn't look like any other movie. At its best, it's buoyant pop focused on ... speed, racing and retina-splitting oceans of digitally captured color.

- Michael Phillips/Chicago Tribune

It's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.

- David Edelstein/ New York magazine

Pure cotton candy - entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist. - Todd McCarthy/Variety

The MPAA should use ... "Speed Racer" to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning "of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of 10." - Anthony Lane/The New Yorker