NOTE: Today is the 10th anniversary of Speed Racer.
"Racing hasn't changed and it never will."
"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us. Every one of us has to find a reason to do this. You don't climb into a T-180 to be a driver. You do it because you're driven."
- Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) and Racer X (Matthew Fox), Speed Racer
One of the first examples of anime to ever cross stateside to the US of A was the series "Mach GoGoGo", which was developed by Tatuso Yoshida. Combining the popularity of Elvis Presley with the gadgets of James Bond led to a high-octane hero who, with the help of his family and friends, set out to conquer the world of racing. When it was brought to the States, the series was given to Peter Fernandez to translate the show into English and find American voices for the shows characters. The lead character's name was changed to Speed Racer with Fernandez leading the voice cast. Many in the cast pulled multiple duties in voicing several characters: Fernandez was not just Speed, but also his long-lost older brother Rex Racer in disguise as Racer X; actress Corrine Orr was Speed's mother and younger brother Spritle and Speed's lovely girlfriend Trixie; actor Jack Grimes was Speed's loyal mechanic Sparky and Spritle's monkey companion Chim-Chim and rounding out the cast was Jack Curtis as both Speed's father Pops and local investigator Inspector Detector.
Fernandez was working around the clock, often delivering a complete redub of an episode within four days. The pay was not that great, but Fernandez and the rest of the cast were dedicated. Years later, the show was picked up by MTV alongside other anime shows like "Æon Flux". "Speed Racer" eventually became an indelible part of pop culture - many later cartoons parodied the often fast-paced intense conversations the characters would have (which was a result of the redub needing to get as much information across as quickly as possible with the footage that was given), the popular theme song (that was never credited with the actual musicians, Danny Davis and the Nashville Brass) and of course, the Mach 5 car.
Naturally, Hollywood could not resist a film adaptation of "Speed Racer", but the road to movie-dom was covered in potholes. Many of Hollywood's top filmmakers today grew up watching the show on TV. Warner Bros. owned the rights to the series and several directors were contacted over the following years: Space Jam's Joe Pytka, Earth Girls are Easy's Julien Temple, My Own Private Idaho's Gus Van Sant (who later went on to the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting and the reviled remake of Psycho) and A Little Princess' Alfonso Cuarón (who later went on to the Oscar-nominated Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the Oscar-winning Gravity). Several screenwriters were also hired and subsequently fired including J.J. Abrams who wrote a very hard-edged script that included a near sex scene with Speed. Ultimately, by the early 2000s, "Speed Racer" was still just a punch line to be mocked in things like a Geico commercial.
This is how the Wachowskis appear in the video game "The Matrix: Path of Neo".
Enter the Wachowskis, hot off the mega franchise The Matrix. They re-teamed with Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver to give "Speed Racer" a new lease on life. While seemingly a out-of-left-field choice to tackle a family-friendly project like Speed Racer, the Wachowskis had a motivation for taking on the project - they were looking to make a cubist film. By their own definition, a cubist film would be a "construction of art based on the imagination of perspective". When asked about the film years later, they said, "We knew that adults cannot accept challenges to their conventional aesthetic, the aesthetic that they are bonded to.... if you sort of assault that aesthetic they will really rage in this primitive way. So we thought maybe we can make it for kids because kids are much more open aesthetically than [adults] are." They brought the whole cast and crew to Germany to film in Studio Babelsberg. Rather than actually filming on location, nearly all of the sets were filmed with green-screen and actors driving shells of cars as opposed to actual cars. Doing this guaranteed the Wachowskis full control over the image (their first in high-definition) and would help to invent their vision of a live-action Speed Racer.
In the high-octane world of racing, there is nobody faster than Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch). Having grown up all his life with an uninhibited love of racing, he is supported by his racecar builder father Pops (John Goodman), his loving Mom (Susan Sarandon), his devoted girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) and his younger brother Spritle (Paulie Litt). Speed is continually haunted by the death of his brother Rex (Scott Porter) during an extremely dangerous off-road rally. The Racer family is approached by billionaire E.P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam) who wants to sign Speed to his high-profile racing team. After showing the family around Royalton's massive corporation, Mom and Pops are immensely distrustful of him, but say the decision belongs with Speed and if he agrees, they will gladly follow in business. Believing that the spirit of racing belongs with the heart and not the bottom line, Speed politely declines. Royalton immediately reveals his true colors as a greedy megalomaniac and proceeds to tell him that if he will not race with him, he and his family will eventually be destroyed. Determined to prove Royalton wrong, Speed and his family reluctantly team up with the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox) and the cunning investigator Inspector Detector (Benno Fürmann). But Royalton will not be taken down easily as he has several of the dirtiest, most destructive racers on his payroll. To defeat them, Speed has to put the pedal to the metal and just go, go, go...
When I first saw the trailers, I was very, very impressed and wanted to know more about the show. I picked up the original series' first season on DVD and enjoyed it very much. When I finally got around to the movie... it did not work for me. (At first.) Among my complaints, I thought Emile Hirsch was way too old to play Speed and Spritle and Chim-Chim interrupted the action far too much than was necessary. One particularly terrible line is "Get that weak-ass shit off my track!" Really? Do we need that in a Speed Racer movie? A momentary use of "Free Bird" is out-of-nowhere. (Does Lynyrd Skynyrd exist in this world? It is clearly not our world.)
But little by little, viewing by viewing, I began to see more positives than negatives. I think that John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are perfectly cast and the screenplay by the Wachowskis gives them good scenes to play around with. There is a wonderful scene where Pops has a talk with Speed near the end of the second act where he tells him he made a mistake letting Rex leave believing that family was not important.
Royalton is also a fantastic (metaphorical) mustache-twirling villain. His utter diabolicalness nearly out-Tim Currys Tim Curry. In the scene where he outs himself as a bad guy he has a whole spiel of the "real" racing world and how it is all about money and power. You really feel the foot on the throat of the Racer family through the whole movie because of this guy's scheming. Just because this one family, this one racer, will not play ball with him is enough for him to scorch them from the face of the earth.
Summer of 2008 seemed prime for a movie like Speed Racer, an all-around fun and entertaining family film with two genius directors. Except there was one movie that came out the week before that has helped to redefine Hollywood blockbusters to this very day: Jon Favreau's Iron Man. Not only was it the first superhero movie of the summer (but Christopher Nolan would soon have the biggest), but it sucked out all the air of May 2008. The movie was also plagued by some of the most pandering-to-kids marketing I think I have ever seen. Trying to hype up Speed Racer by making him seem hip and cool and with it is just the wrong way to go. Sell the car. The car is the coolest thing about the entire concept. You could do a whole teaser trailer about it ala the original T2 teaser trailer with no footage from the actual movie but it is selling you a new Arnold Terminator. The Wachowskis moved on to the utterly brilliant Cloud Atlas as well as the turgid Jupiter Ascending. Hopefully, they will return to better work soon.
Speed Racer is a franchise all-in-one movie. It gets almost every aspect of the original show in one movie without the need for sequels. Not only that, but its visuals are unparalleled even to this day; it is a perfect example of how to make a green-screen film. The psychedelic transitions are mind-bending and very creative. It has been 10 years since its initial release and many lovers of film are much kinder to it today than they were then, often introducing it to their own kids. It proves that the finish line is not the release date.
In the high-octane world of racing, there is nobody faster than Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch). Having grown up all his life with an uninhibited love of racing, he is supported by his racecar builder father Pops (John Goodman), his loving Mom (Susan Sarandon), his devoted girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) and his younger brother Spritle (Paulie Litt). Speed is continually haunted by the death of his brother Rex (Scott Porter) during an extremely dangerous off-road rally. The Racer family is approached by billionaire E.P. Arnold Royalton (Roger Allam) who wants to sign Speed to his high-profile racing team. After showing the family around Royalton's massive corporation, Mom and Pops are immensely distrustful of him, but say the decision belongs with Speed and if he agrees, they will gladly follow in business. Believing that the spirit of racing belongs with the heart and not the bottom line, Speed politely declines. Royalton immediately reveals his true colors as a greedy megalomaniac and proceeds to tell him that if he will not race with him, he and his family will eventually be destroyed. Determined to prove Royalton wrong, Speed and his family reluctantly team up with the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox) and the cunning investigator Inspector Detector (Benno Fürmann). But Royalton will not be taken down easily as he has several of the dirtiest, most destructive racers on his payroll. To defeat them, Speed has to put the pedal to the metal and just go, go, go...
When I first saw the trailers, I was very, very impressed and wanted to know more about the show. I picked up the original series' first season on DVD and enjoyed it very much. When I finally got around to the movie... it did not work for me. (At first.) Among my complaints, I thought Emile Hirsch was way too old to play Speed and Spritle and Chim-Chim interrupted the action far too much than was necessary. One particularly terrible line is "Get that weak-ass shit off my track!" Really? Do we need that in a Speed Racer movie? A momentary use of "Free Bird" is out-of-nowhere. (Does Lynyrd Skynyrd exist in this world? It is clearly not our world.)
But little by little, viewing by viewing, I began to see more positives than negatives. I think that John Goodman and Susan Sarandon are perfectly cast and the screenplay by the Wachowskis gives them good scenes to play around with. There is a wonderful scene where Pops has a talk with Speed near the end of the second act where he tells him he made a mistake letting Rex leave believing that family was not important.
"I lost him here. I let him think that a stupid motor company meant more to me than he did. You'll never know how much I regret that mistake. It's enough I'll never make it again. Speed, I understand that every child has to leave home. But I want you to know, that door is always open. You can always come back. 'Cause I love you."
Royalton is also a fantastic (metaphorical) mustache-twirling villain. His utter diabolicalness nearly out-Tim Currys Tim Curry. In the scene where he outs himself as a bad guy he has a whole spiel of the "real" racing world and how it is all about money and power. You really feel the foot on the throat of the Racer family through the whole movie because of this guy's scheming. Just because this one family, this one racer, will not play ball with him is enough for him to scorch them from the face of the earth.
Summer of 2008 seemed prime for a movie like Speed Racer, an all-around fun and entertaining family film with two genius directors. Except there was one movie that came out the week before that has helped to redefine Hollywood blockbusters to this very day: Jon Favreau's Iron Man. Not only was it the first superhero movie of the summer (but Christopher Nolan would soon have the biggest), but it sucked out all the air of May 2008. The movie was also plagued by some of the most pandering-to-kids marketing I think I have ever seen. Trying to hype up Speed Racer by making him seem hip and cool and with it is just the wrong way to go. Sell the car. The car is the coolest thing about the entire concept. You could do a whole teaser trailer about it ala the original T2 teaser trailer with no footage from the actual movie but it is selling you a new Arnold Terminator. The Wachowskis moved on to the utterly brilliant Cloud Atlas as well as the turgid Jupiter Ascending. Hopefully, they will return to better work soon.
Speed Racer is a franchise all-in-one movie. It gets almost every aspect of the original show in one movie without the need for sequels. Not only that, but its visuals are unparalleled even to this day; it is a perfect example of how to make a green-screen film. The psychedelic transitions are mind-bending and very creative. It has been 10 years since its initial release and many lovers of film are much kinder to it today than they were then, often introducing it to their own kids. It proves that the finish line is not the release date.
No comments:
Post a Comment