Speed Racer

• 1. Introduction

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  Speed Racer began not as a television show, but as a comic book rooted in two films that captivated a young artist in Japan. Tatsuo Yoshida saw Viva Las Vegas and Goldfinger and was transfixed by two very different images: Elvis Presley behind the wheel of a race car, complete with neckerchief and black pompadour, and James Bond navigating threats in a gadget-laden Aston Martin DB5. From those two films, a single character crystallized. What if a young man combined the look of one and the ingenuity of the other? The result became Mach GoGoGo, and then, crossing the Pacific, Speed Racer. By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, an estimated 40 million viewers in the United States had watched the show. For decades it was considered the defining face of anime in America. How did a story conceived by one man in Japan reach that audience? What made the Mach 5 so memorable? Who reshaped the series for American ears, and what happened when the franchise tried to grow beyond its original fifty-two episodes?

• 2. From Pilot Ace to Mach GoGoGo

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  Yoshida's earlier and more popular automobile racing comic, Pilot Ace, provided the structural backbone for Mach GoGoGo. The main storyline of Pilot Ace was carried forward and reshaped around an ambitious young man who works his way into professional racing. Character designs from Pilot Ace also carried over directly, establishing the visual language of the new series before a single episode was animated. Mach GoGoGo hit shelves in the early 1960s, serialized in Shueisha's 1966 Shonen Book magazine. The central figure was Gō Mifune, whose given name is a Japanese homophone for the number five, the same number painted on the doors of his car. The large red M on the Mach 5's hood stands for Mifune Motors, the family business, and is simultaneously an homage to Japanese film star Toshiro Mifune. In North America, audiences assumed the M stood for Mach 5. In the Latin American version, the car became the Meteoro, and the letter took on yet another meaning. Yoshida compressed all of this symbolism into a single emblem that meant something different depending on where you watched.

• 3. Peter Fernandez and the American Voice

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  Trans-Lux acquired the English-language rights to Mach GoGoGo, and Speed Racer premiered on American television in the summer of 1967. The work of translating the series for American audiences fell to producer Peter Fernandez, who did not simply supervise the process but executed much of it personally. Fernandez wrote and directed the English-language dialogue, and he provided the voices of several characters himself, most notably Racer X and Speed Racer. He also rearranged the melody of the theme song, originally written and composed by Nobuyoshi Koshibe, and wrote the English lyrics that became one of the most recognized cartoon themes of the era. The dubbing process involved significant editing to the soundtrack, including added narration, while the image track was left largely intact. One notable adjustment was that the names of villains were often made more cartoony for American audiences. The character called Professor Anarchy in episode 31, for instance, appeared in an episode known in Japanese as "Lightning-Quick Ninja Cars" but retitled "Gang of Assassins" in English. Speed's full American name, Go Mifune, was itself a direct tribute to the Japanese film star Toshiro Mifune, a gesture folded quietly into a children's series broadcast in syndication across the United States.

• 4. The Racer Family

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  Pops Racer, born Daisuke Mifune in the Japanese original, began his career as a champion heavyweight wrestler before founding Mifune Motors. He is the mechanical mind behind the Mach 5 and its siblings in the Mach series, and his volatile temperament drives one of the series' central conflicts. Six years before the story begins, Pops told his eldest son Rex that he was not ready to compete professionally. Rex was leading a race with less than one lap remaining when he lost control of the car and wrecked it. Pops erupted with anger, and Rex left the family, vowing to become the world's greatest race car driver. He returned in disguise as Racer X, driving car number 9, the Shooting Star. Pops and Speed both acknowledged that Racer X was the superior driver, though Speed still vowed to beat him. Racer X often sacrificed his own race finishes to protect Speed from hostile competitors, typically finishing second while Speed crossed the line first, then disappearing before anyone could connect him to Rex Racer. Speed's girlfriend Trixie, originally Michi Shimura, was named after actor Takashi Shimura, who had collaborated with Toshiro Mifune on several films. Her father is the president of Shimura Aviation, which explains why she pilots her own helicopter during races. Trixie acted as Speed's spotter from the air. Unlike most female characters in animated series of that era, she was not written as a passive figure: when captured by villains, she argued back rather than waiting to be rescued, and on several occasions she was the one doing the rescuing.

• 5. The Mach 5 and Its Rivals

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  Buttons labeled A through G on the Mach 5's steering wheel hub gave Speed access to a range of tools, from auto-jacks to a homing robot. The car's body followed a sleek Coke bottle silhouette, white with a two-seat red interior and the number 5 on both side doors. In the anime and manga, that number is the car's racing designation. In the 2008 film, it signifies the fifth vehicle in Pops' Mach series. The Mammoth Car, appearing only in the anime, stood as the Mach 5's largest adversary. Built almost entirely from stolen gold bars worth fifty million dollars, it was designed by villain Cruncher Block and entered in a race called The No Limit World Race as a smuggling vehicle. Its main engine produced 7,500 horsepower; each of its wheels held an additional 1,500 horsepower engine, giving the vehicle a combined total of 30,000 horsepower. It could travel at 500 miles per hour and stretched more than 200 yards in length. The Mammoth Car was ultimately destroyed when it crashed into an oil refinery and melted back into its constituent gold. The GRX presented a different kind of threat. Its engine was designed by Ben Cranem and had already killed four test drivers and its inventor before the story begins. A special serum called V-gas was used to artificially sharpen the reflexes of anyone driving it. If the driver consumed anything containing water while under the V-gas, they would develop an overwhelming phobia of speed, a physiological trap that sealed the fate of Cranem's son Curly during a pit stop.

• 6. Fifty-Two Episodes and a Franchise

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  Tatsunoko produced fifty-two episodes of the original series between 1967 and 1968. In 1997, the studio produced a modernized version titled Mach GoGoGo that aired on TV Tokyo for 34 episodes. An English-language adaptation of that remake, produced by DiC and titled Speed Racer X, aired in 2002 on Nickelodeon. Only the first 13 of those 34 episodes were adapted, the remainder lost to licensing disputes between DiC and Speed Racer Enterprises. Speed Racer Enterprises had acquired rights to the original series in the early 1990s and was responsible for the wave of merchandise that accompanied the franchise's 1990s revival, including die-cast collectibles, action figures, and home video releases. The company also arranged for reruns of the original series on MTV, airing in the early morning hours, before the show moved to Cartoon Network in 1996. In December 2013, Tatsunoko regained all rights to the Speed Racer franchise retroactively to May 2011, settling lawsuits in which the studio claimed Speed Racer Enterprises had exceeded its contractual licensing authority. The Wachowskis wrote and directed a live-action film adaptation released on the 9th of May 2008. It made just under 93 million dollars worldwide against a production budget of at least 120 million dollars and was poorly received by critics. In 2022, Apple TV+ announced a live-action television series with J.J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot in development, based on a script Abrams had written in the 1990s. In 2025, Mad Cave Studios began a new Speed Racer comic book series written by David Pepose and illustrated by Davide Tinto, with issue one earning an averaged critic rating of 9.4 out of 10 from Comic Book Round Up.

• 7. Early Anime in America

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  The title sequence of Speed Racer contains what has been identified as an early anime example of bullet time: as Speed leaps from the Mach 5 at the sequence's end, he freezes in mid-jump while the camera performs an arc shot from front to sideways. The technique would not be named or widely recognized until decades later, but it appears here in a series that aired in 1967. IGN later ranked the original Speed Racer series at number 29 on its list of the best 100 animated series. The show is said to have defined anime in the United States until the 1990s, a characterization that points to how few other Japanese animated series achieved the same mainstream visibility during those decades. When Funimation released the series on Blu-ray for the first time in 2017, it issued two separate editions: a standard release of the English version on the 30th of May, and a collector's edition of the Japanese version with English subtitles on the 7th of November, which marked the first North American release of the Japanese-language version. On the 2nd of May 2024, Shout! Studios took over the US distribution rights from Crunchyroll, beginning with a digital release of the original series on the 1st of June.