alt title(s): Mach Go Go Go
— Narrator
English title of the anime series
Mach Go Go Go!, and one of the best remembered anime series for several generations of fans and detractors alike.
Speed Racer (yes, that's his real name) is a young race car driver, who drives an incredible supercar designed by his father, "Pops" Racer. Speed would race dangerous routes against dangerous people and come out on top in the end. His "girlfriend", Trixie, would trail him in a helicopter, and his little brother Spridle and the ape Chim-Chim would stow away in the trunk.
It was, at its core, a
Mecha Show. The "Mach 5" ("Mach Go" in Japanese, yielding the pun in the original name) had an array of gadgets more at home on Bond's Aston-Martin than on a racing vehicle, like jump boosters, a spy robot, underwater capabilities, and a trunk (which even street-legal sports cars often lack).
This show is remembered for its goofy character designs, crappy animation and atrocious dub, as well as its memorable characters and over-the-top sensibilities. The show is both fondly remembered and reviled by many anime fans for introducing anime to a wider audience and for coloring its general image. Speed's effeminate look, the way the dubbing actors have to race through the dialogue and narration to fit in all the exposition, and the long sequences without movement all combine to create a style that defined not only this show, but the view of anime in general for generations of Americans. He's a hard man to lose. He's a demon on wheels! Ho-Hoa!
Speed Racer was remade in 1997 with updated versions of the characters and vehicles, but the most amusing appearance of Speed in the last few years had to have been in a series of tongue-in-cheek ESPN commercials. One of the ads featured real NASCAR drivers complaining about how hard it was to compete with Speed, and showed actual race footage with the Mach 5 matted in; another featured NASCAR officials trying to determine if the Mach 5 was suitable for competition. (The decision? No, it was too powerful. "NASA might accept it, but not NASCAR.")
Now a
major motion picture.
The pun in the original title comes from the triple meaning of the sound "go" in Japanese — the number "five", a denotation for the number or name of a machine (
Mach Go-go means the Mach Type 5 — the same can be seen in
Tetsujin 28-go), and the English "Ready, set,
go". The main character's name is also Go.
This show provides examples of:
- Acro Fatic: Pops, naturally.
- Action Girl: Trixie is far more Speed's equal than a helpless Damsel In Distress that one would expect from a series at this time. On the occasions where she was kidnapped she managed to be more trouble to her captors than she was worth.
- Alternate Continuity
- Badass Mustache Lionel "Pops" Racer
- Black Knight (Racer X)
- Blind Idiot Translation: One story arc featured a car named after Napoleon Bonaparte's horse Marengo
... or "Melange" as it was known after being translated from French to Japanese to English.
- Boring Invincible Hero (Speed lost all of once in the original series' run, and that's because he was deliberately sabotaged so someone who needed the prize money for his sister's medical treatment could win. The movie decided to make his weaknesses more emotional rather than throttle down his racing ability.)
- Bragging Theme Tune
- Bullet Time
- Car Fu: And how!
- Cool Car
- Chick Magnet: Speed
- Ear Worm: The main theme will stay in your head forever.
- Estrogen Brigade Bait: Again, Speed.
- Every Car Is A Pinto
- Genius Bruiser (Pops Racer)
- Good Bad Translation (Who doesn't remember the narmtacularly hilarious dialogue?)
- Ho Yay (Speed's androgony seems to attract a lot of this)
- Let's face it, Speed is sexy no matter what gender you are.
- It Was His Sled: Racer X is Speed's brother. This was almost convincingly subverted in The Movie, making the Double Subversion at the end all the more juicier.
- Long Lost Sibling: Unbeknownst to Speed, Racer X is really his long lost brother, Rex Racer. The Narrator tells the viewer this every chance he gets; or Rex thinks about it where only the viewer can hear.
- Narrator ("One of the most secret, secret places in the world: the Secret National Science Institute.")
- Never Say Die: Averted? There are several deaths in the show (not a LOT, mind you) mostly due to crashes and other racing dangers.
- Nightmare Fuel: This troper remembers, horrifically well even now, a scene where Trixie has a nightmare where she runs up to Speed and he turns out to be a blue faced psychotic demon with nasty sharp pointy teeth.. Who gets set on FIRE.
- Non Human Sidekick (Chim-chim)
- One Two Three Four Go (The Mach Go, called the Mach 5 in the US)
- Punny Name (Particularly with the bad guys)
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Inspector Detector
- Serious Business (Racing)
- Shout Out: The latest animated adaptation, Speed Racer: The Next Generation, has several shoutouts to the original show, including the main character's name (Speed). The most obvious (and to this troper, hilarious) is his roommate, who looks and sounds very much like the original Speed (he's Speed Racer's biggest, and most obsessed, fan) who has a robot monkey named "Chim-Chim".
- By some miracle, they were able to get Peter Fernandez, the original English voice, into the recording booth as an adult Spritle, and eventually, Speed himself.
- Slo Mo Big Air
- So Bad Its Good (Except it's so bad it's awesome.)
- Speed Stripes
- Steven Ulysses Perhero (When your name is Speed Racer, there's really only one job you can have.)
- This, however, is an artifact of the translation. The original name for the character is Go Mifune and that's why the car and "Speed"'s helmet have a big "M". The only pun is that "Go" and "five" are homophones in Japanese. (For more information check The Other Wiki).
- I thought the "M" in the car stood for "Mach", as in Mach 5.
- The Latin-American Spanish version "explained" the "M" by changing Speed's name to "Meteoro" ("Meteor").
- Which leaves the "G" (from "Go") in his shirt.
- Switching To GEICO: What, you think I'm kidding?
- Tagalong Kid (Spritle)
- Weaponized Car
