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Go Speed Racer! Go Speed Racer! Inside the Speed Racer Movie
Speed Racer Runs From Animation to Live Action in a Big New Film. Sort of!
Check out the Speed Racer Movie Trailer.
Speed Racer is just the sort of guy any self-respecting 6-year-old boy wants to grow up to be. He's handsome, smart, loyal to his girl Trixie, tolerant of his little brother Spritle, devoted to his dad, and he's always busy revving up the powerful Mach 5. Best of all, however, Speed Racer is a cartoon and it has a wicked cool theme song!
This May 9, however, Speed Racer faces the greatest challenge of his brilliant 42-year career — even more dangerous than the Giant Car. That's when Speed transitions to the big screen as a major motion picture from the same producers, writers and directors who brought the world the Matrix trilogy.
Yeah, there are real people in this version of Speed Racer — familiar actors Susan Sarandon and John Goodman are aboard as Mom and Pops Racer respectively, Christina Ricci plays Trixie, Matthew Fox from TV's Lost plays Racer X and Emile Hirsch is Speed Racer himself — but that doesn't mean this isn't an animated film. In fact the actors spent most of their time performing in front of green screens at a studio in Germany, with computers generating all the physics-defying racing action and most of the settings later on.
"The car races in Speed Racer couldn't have been filmed until now — there would have been no way to do those races without the effects we created," producer Joel Silver told the Los Angeles Times. "There are no cars, no stands, no people."
Warner Bros., the same studio that 40 years ago released the classic car chase film Bullitt, is betting that audiences are now ready to leap beyond real car stunts to virtual ones.
Wachowski Certified Entertainment
It's no surprise to see Speed Racer coming from two hard-core comic book and Japanese anime fans like the Brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski. Prior to ever working in films, the Chicago-raised duo collaborated on comic books, and much of the Matrix trilogy swipes themes straight from Japanese animated features. The original Speed Racer was, after all — besides being, at least nominally, about car racing — among the first examples of Japanese animation to gain a widespread audience in America. So expect the Wachowskis, who have cowritten, coproduced and codirected the new Speed Racer movie, to honor that visual and dramatic tradition beyond all else.
"In the genesis of Larry and Andy's idea," production designer Owen Peterson told the science fiction Web site io9.com, "they were trying to pay homage to the cartoon series that came out of Japan in the '60s. And so the idea in a nutshell was to do a movie that's photographically real, but that was two-dimensional and had a sense of cartoon style."
Racing With Flintstone Power
But at least one Mach 5 was, in fact, built for the production. Though there's no indication that it actually ran.
Displayed at January's 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, during the 2008 New York Auto Show in March and at the Long Beach Grand Prix in April, the Mach 5 constructed for the film takes most of its appearance cues straight from the classic cartoon. This is a car that looks almost retro in its vision of the future; curvy, long and slightly phallic.
However, no one involved with the Speed Racer movie has ever indicated that it's anything more than a well-finished prop. It's a pusher that, given a mighty shove and the right camera tricks, can be made to look like it's going 300 mph. Well, at least 30 mph.
Beyond the Mach 5
What's more interesting is the imaginary technology powering the fictional car. According to Warner Bros.' press release, the 300-mph, 200-inch-long, 100-inch wheelbase Mach 5 is powered by a front-mounted engine making 1,000 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 1,000 pound-feet of peak torque at 7,000 rpm. But don't expect to find turbochargers or conventional internal combustion of any sort under the big "M" on its pretend hood. The Mach 5 isn't even a car as we know it, but like all the race machinery in the Speed Racer world it's a "T-180."
"It's a world where [the T-180s] don't use gasoline," production designer Peterson told io9.com in his interview. "[The T-180s] have motors that take like battery power and convert it using a thing called a transponder and they convert this theoretical energy through a convertinator, into a high-powered non-CO2 fuel. They're not burning gasoline when you see those cars going around."
Of course the Mach 5 has always been more than merely quick. And in the film, as in the cartoon, all Speed has to do is press one of the buttons on his steering wheel to trigger the jump-jacks, bulletproof polymer cockpit canopy, tire shields, the Hexa-Dyno spare tire, tire crampons, remote control flying camera drone or the super-wicked zircon-tipped saw blades.
But the Mach 5 isn't the ultimate car in Speed Racer. During the film, Speed also finds himself behind an even more radical machine: the single-seat Mach 6. Unlike the antiquated Mach 5, the Mach 6 is all-wheel drive and all four of its wheels can turn 360 degrees. So if it really existed, it would be very easy to park.
A tiny version of the Mach 6 has already been released by Mattel as a Hot Wheels model.
Speed Racer: the Unavoidable
With the wave of publicity coming from Warner Bros., expect Speed Racer to become part of our culture in a way it never has been before. What started as a cheap Japanese cartoon show called Mach GoGoGo in 1966 is getting a hard-core, American-style marketing push with corporate partners like Yokohama tire, General Mills, Puma, Esurance and, naturally, McDonald's.
There's even a sweepstakes with the prize being a C5 Corvette modified to look like the Mach 5. (It looks more like a mid-'60s Sting Ray.) By the time the film opens in a couple of weeks, every 6-year-old boy in this country will have pestered his parents dozens of times to go see it.
And since so many of us parents have memories of the original Speed Racer, we're looking forward to seeing it, too. After all, a lot of us used to be 6-year-old boys.
Speed Racer is just the sort of guy any self-respecting 6-year-old boy wants to grow up to be. He's handsome, smart, loyal to his girl Trixie, tolerant of his little brother Spritle, devoted to his dad, and he's always busy revving up the powerful Mach 5. Best of all, however, Speed Racer is a cartoon and it has a wicked cool theme song!
This May 9, however, Speed Racer faces the greatest challenge of his brilliant 42-year career — even more dangerous than the Giant Car. That's when Speed transitions to the big screen as a major motion picture from the same producers, writers and directors who brought the world the Matrix trilogy.
Yeah, there are real people in this version of Speed Racer — familiar actors Susan Sarandon and John Goodman are aboard as Mom and Pops Racer respectively, Christina Ricci plays Trixie, Matthew Fox from TV's Lost plays Racer X and Emile Hirsch is Speed Racer himself — but that doesn't mean this isn't an animated film. In fact the actors spent most of their time performing in front of green screens at a studio in Germany, with computers generating all the physics-defying racing action and most of the settings later on.
"The car races in Speed Racer couldn't have been filmed until now — there would have been no way to do those races without the effects we created," producer Joel Silver told the Los Angeles Times. "There are no cars, no stands, no people."
Warner Bros., the same studio that 40 years ago released the classic car chase film Bullitt, is betting that audiences are now ready to leap beyond real car stunts to virtual ones.
Wachowski Certified Entertainment
It's no surprise to see Speed Racer coming from two hard-core comic book and Japanese anime fans like the Brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski. Prior to ever working in films, the Chicago-raised duo collaborated on comic books, and much of the Matrix trilogy swipes themes straight from Japanese animated features. The original Speed Racer was, after all — besides being, at least nominally, about car racing — among the first examples of Japanese animation to gain a widespread audience in America. So expect the Wachowskis, who have cowritten, coproduced and codirected the new Speed Racer movie, to honor that visual and dramatic tradition beyond all else.
"In the genesis of Larry and Andy's idea," production designer Owen Peterson told the science fiction Web site io9.com, "they were trying to pay homage to the cartoon series that came out of Japan in the '60s. And so the idea in a nutshell was to do a movie that's photographically real, but that was two-dimensional and had a sense of cartoon style."
Racing With Flintstone Power
But at least one Mach 5 was, in fact, built for the production. Though there's no indication that it actually ran.
Displayed at January's 2008 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, during the 2008 New York Auto Show in March and at the Long Beach Grand Prix in April, the Mach 5 constructed for the film takes most of its appearance cues straight from the classic cartoon. This is a car that looks almost retro in its vision of the future; curvy, long and slightly phallic.
However, no one involved with the Speed Racer movie has ever indicated that it's anything more than a well-finished prop. It's a pusher that, given a mighty shove and the right camera tricks, can be made to look like it's going 300 mph. Well, at least 30 mph.
Beyond the Mach 5
What's more interesting is the imaginary technology powering the fictional car. According to Warner Bros.' press release, the 300-mph, 200-inch-long, 100-inch wheelbase Mach 5 is powered by a front-mounted engine making 1,000 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 1,000 pound-feet of peak torque at 7,000 rpm. But don't expect to find turbochargers or conventional internal combustion of any sort under the big "M" on its pretend hood. The Mach 5 isn't even a car as we know it, but like all the race machinery in the Speed Racer world it's a "T-180."
"It's a world where [the T-180s] don't use gasoline," production designer Peterson told io9.com in his interview. "[The T-180s] have motors that take like battery power and convert it using a thing called a transponder and they convert this theoretical energy through a convertinator, into a high-powered non-CO2 fuel. They're not burning gasoline when you see those cars going around."
Of course the Mach 5 has always been more than merely quick. And in the film, as in the cartoon, all Speed has to do is press one of the buttons on his steering wheel to trigger the jump-jacks, bulletproof polymer cockpit canopy, tire shields, the Hexa-Dyno spare tire, tire crampons, remote control flying camera drone or the super-wicked zircon-tipped saw blades.
But the Mach 5 isn't the ultimate car in Speed Racer. During the film, Speed also finds himself behind an even more radical machine: the single-seat Mach 6. Unlike the antiquated Mach 5, the Mach 6 is all-wheel drive and all four of its wheels can turn 360 degrees. So if it really existed, it would be very easy to park.
A tiny version of the Mach 6 has already been released by Mattel as a Hot Wheels model.
Speed Racer: the Unavoidable
With the wave of publicity coming from Warner Bros., expect Speed Racer to become part of our culture in a way it never has been before. What started as a cheap Japanese cartoon show called Mach GoGoGo in 1966 is getting a hard-core, American-style marketing push with corporate partners like Yokohama tire, General Mills, Puma, Esurance and, naturally, McDonald's.
There's even a sweepstakes with the prize being a C5 Corvette modified to look like the Mach 5. (It looks more like a mid-'60s Sting Ray.) By the time the film opens in a couple of weeks, every 6-year-old boy in this country will have pestered his parents dozens of times to go see it.
And since so many of us parents have memories of the original Speed Racer, we're looking forward to seeing it, too. After all, a lot of us used to be 6-year-old boys.
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