Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tatsuo Yoshida was inspired by two films popular in Japan at the time, Viva Las Vegas and Goldfinger. He combined Elvis Presley's race-car-driving image, including neckerchief and black pompadour, with James Bond's gadget-filled Aston Martin DB5 to create the concept for Speed Racer and the Mach 5.
The original Mach GoGoGo anime aired on Fuji Television from April 1967 to March 1968. The English-language version, Speed Racer, premiered on American television in the summer of 1967 through syndicator Trans-Lux.
Peter Fernandez was the producer who adapted Speed Racer for American audiences. He wrote and directed the English-language dialogue, voiced several characters including Speed Racer and Racer X, rearranged the theme song melody composed by Nobuyoshi Koshibe, and wrote the English lyrics.
In the original Japanese series, the M stands for Mifune Motors, the family business, and is also an homage to Japanese film star Toshiro Mifune. In North America, audiences assumed it stood for Mach 5, and in the Latin American version it was associated with the car's name there, Meteoro.
An estimated total audience of 40 million viewers watched Speed Racer in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The series is credited with defining anime in the United States until the 1990s.
The 2008 Speed Racer film, written and directed by the Wachowskis and released on the 9th of May 2008, made just under 93 million dollars worldwide against a production budget of at least 120 million dollars. It was poorly received by most critics and was a box office failure.