Anime / Speed Racer

Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer!
Go, Speed Racer, GO!!

"Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer!
He's a demon on wheels!
He's a demon and he's gonna be chasin' after someone!
He's gaining on you, so you better look alive
He's busy revving up the powerful Mach 5!
And when the odds are against him and there's dangerous work to do...
You bet your life, Speed Racer, will see it through!"

- The iconic English theme song

English title of the Tatsunoko Production anime series Mach Go Go Go! (based on Tatsuo Yoshida's manga of the same name), and one of the best remembered anime series for several generations of fans and detractors alike.

Speed Racer (Go Mifune) is the young driver of the Mach 5, an incredible supercar designed by his father "Pops" Racer (Daisuke Mifune). Speed would race dangerous routes against dangerous people and come out on top with his "girlfriend" Trixie (Michi Shimura) trailing him in a helicopter and his little brother Spritle (Kurio) and his pet chimp Chim-Chim (Sanpei) frequently stowing away in the trunk.

The "Mach Five" ("Mach Go" in Japanese,^note Or simply, "The Mach" 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 autojacks,^note Meant more for maintenance, but frequently used to make the car jump. a spy robot, underwater capabilities and a trunk (which even street-legal sports cars often lack).^note Though at the time a sports car actually did have to have a trunk to compete at LeMans.

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". Speed's Japanese name is also "Go Mifune" (hence the "G" on his shirt).

The show is notable for being one of the very first anime localized in English for US television, all the way back in 1967, following only Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. It was by far the most successful and well-known series for decades, and practically defined anime (or "Japanimation," as it was known at the time) in America until around the mid-90s.

Speed Racer is remembered by Americans for its goofy character designs, limited animation and a very low-quality English localization, courtesy of Trans-Lux and Zavala-Riss Productions, as well as its memorable characters and over-the-top sensibilities. The show is both fondly remembered and reviled by many anime fans not for introducing anime to a wider audience, but for coloring its general image at the time. Speed's effeminate look, the way the dubbing actors have to race through the dialogue and narration to fit in all the exposition and keep up with the lip flaps, 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!"

There was a American-made Speed Racer cartoon in the early '90s titled The New Adventures of Speed Racer, which wasn't well-received. Four years later, there was a Japanese-made remake in 1997 with updated versions of the characters and vehicles, but numerous changes to its source material. Known in Japan as Mach Go Go Go: Restart, its English adaptation was produced by DIC and titled Speed Racer X, but was short-lived thanks to a lawsuit between DIC and the American-based Speed Racer Enterprises.

The most amusing appearance of Speed Racer in America had to have been in a series of tongue-in-cheek commercials for ESPN and GEICO Insurance. One of the ads for ESPN 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.") An ad for Geico involves Trixie (from a helicopter) telling Speed (driving in a race) that she saved money by switching to Geico.

SRE intended to revive the whole title into a new franchise in time for the anime's 40th anniversary. The Wachowskis wrote and directed a major motion picture based on Speed Racer in 2008, which was met enthusiastically by some fans, but failed to impress critics or do well in the box office. A week before the film's release, Nicktoons premiered yet another American television adaptation called Speed Racer: The Next Generation to play up the hype for the film. The second season premiered 3 years later.

Speed Racer Enterprises' rights to the franchise expired on May 31, 2011. After two lawsuits issued in 2012 between Tatsunoko and SRE were dismissed, the former company announced in a press release issued on December 6, 2014 that all rights to Speed Racer reverted to the studio. On May 25, 2015, Tatsunoko announced that they were developing a new Speed Racer anime series, in addition to a new licensing program to reintroduce the franchise. In August of that year, the original series was licensed by Funimation. Funimation gave the English version of the series its first Blu-ray release (and a DVD re-release) on May 30, 2017. A collector's edition, with the original Japanese version of both the original series and the 1997 remake, was released on November 3, 2017.

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"Trope, Speed Racer, trope!":

• Adaptation Induced Plothole: At the beginning of every episode there's a weird unexplained five-second freeze frame; this was where the original version included its Episode Title Cards, while the American version included its own between the Title Sequence and the episode itself.
• Acrofatic: Pops, naturally.
• Action Girl: Michi/Trixie is far more Speed's equal than the helpless Damsel in Distress that one would expect from a series at this time. She flies her own helicopter and on the occasions where she's kidnapped, she manages to give her captors a lot of trouble.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: "Motorcycle Apaches" sees a gang of Apaches on motorcycles attacking a convey moving through the desert.
• All There in the Manual: American-made tie-in comics reveal Speed's actual first name is Greg (to match the G on his shirt), and Pops' is Lionel.
• Almost Out of Oxygen: The Mach 5's submarine mode only has 30 minutes' worth of air. Guess what they're about to run out of at the end of part 1 of a 2-parter.
• Aloof Big Brother: Rex to Speed. Subverted, since he has to keep up the pretense that they're unrelated rivals; distant affection is about as much as he dares show.
• Arc Welding: The episode "The Trick Race," which is the third to last episode of the series, introduces a gang of spies who say that various other criminals from previous episodes, including "Gang of Assassins" and "The Dangerous Witness," were all members of their organization.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the mouth of titular Terrifying Gambler: "I'm wanted for robbery, murder, swindling, and cheating at dominoes!"
• Artistic License – Biology: One scene in the "Desperate Desert Race" arc features the Villain of the Week sneak scorpions into Speed and his rival of the week Kim's car before a race, intending to assassinate them. The scorpion is heavily implied to be very venomous, as Speed and Kim resort to doing a rolling jump out of their cars to shake it off before it can sting them. However, most scorpion stings in real life are not lethal to most healthy adults; the exception being the Indian red scorpion. However, those can't be found in Arabia, the country the episode takes place in.
• Artistic License – Physics: With gold's density, there's no way the Mammoth Car could keep up with the rest of the pack even with more than 7000 horsepower onboard.
• Badass Driver: Several characters, but especially Speed and Rex.
• Badass Family: The Racers. Even Spritle.
• Bat Deduction: In the first episode, a group of thugs attack Speed on the raceway, demanding his windshield. Immediately, Go/Speed deduces Pops put his fancy blueprints on the windshield of the car in invisible ink.
• Big Brother Mentor: The mysterious Racer X will frequently give Speed advice for upcoming races, warn him of danger, and has saved his life on numerous occasions. However, he also does his best to win when he races against Speed, and Speed sees him as a rival. (Anyone who's watched the show for more than ten minutes will know that he actually is Speed's older brother, Rex Racer).
• The Big Race: Most of the episodes.
• Black Knight: Fukumen Racer [The Masked Racer]/Racer X.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation:
  • One story arc featured a car named after Napoléon Bonaparte's horse Marengo... or "Melange" as it was known after being translated from French to Japanese to English.
  • An international peace conference somehow came out as an "International Piecemeal Conference".
• Bowdlerization: Surprisingly averted for the most part in the English dub. Despite airing in The Dark Age of Animation, when Moral Guardians held absurd power over animation studios, Speed Racer still had most of the dark elements of Mach Go Go Go, including physical fighting, gunfire, explosions, and even characters being killed.
• Bragging Theme Tune: Right here.
  • And it even kept the original Japanese melody!
  • It should be noted however, that while the English version is about Speed himself, the Japanese one was more about the car.
• Brats with Slingshots: Spritle.
• Brought to You by the Letter "S": Speed has an "M" on his helmet and a "G" on his shirt, both for his Japanese name, Go Mifune. Trixie also has an "M" on her blouse, for Michi Shimura. Since the Mach 5 carries a stylized M design on the hood people who saw the English dub can be forgiven if they thought the "M" on Speed's helmet also stood for "Mach."
  • Or for "Meteoro," Speed's name in the Spanish dub.
• Broken Aesop: Speed's loss to Hap Hazard is supposed to be a stab at putting your pride before others' feelings and Honor Before Reason attitudes, but it fumbles because 1. Hap Hazard proceeds to engage in serious Unsportsmanlike Gloating despite only winning on a technicality, and 2. Hap's sister seems to believe Speed intentionally threw the race for her, which he doesn't deny, so Speed ultimately still comes out with his honor and pride mostly intact.
• Car Fu: And how! This is frequently full-contact racing, with cars that are weaponized to match.
• Catchphrase: Speed likes to exclaim "OHHH!!!" to such an extent that it becomes this. Note that this is a side effect of the rather Lip Lock heavy English scripts Fernandez wrote around the lazy syllable syncing of the original Tatsunoko animation.
• Chase-Scene Obstacle Course: In the episode "Race For Revenge, Part I", Melange drives clean through a fruit stand while being pursued by the police and the Mach 5.
• Cave Behind the Falls: The episode "Girl Daredevil" shows that there is a secret cave behind Niagara Falls, filled with gold.
• Chekhov's Arsenal: Every time there's a car chase of Speed vs. the villains, the villains' cars will always have three dashboard buttons: one for a pair of machine guns, the second for an oil slick, and the third will always be something different with each villain (flamethrower, poison gas, barrel bombs, and so on).
• Chick Magnet: Speed. Much to Trixie's consternation.
• Clear Their Name: Speed is framed in "Mach 5 vs. Mach 5" when a copy of the Mach 5 was used as a getaway vehicle in the theft of the Mizmo Beam. The father and daughter Speed was helping at the time claim they never met him before, which only made him look guilty. Trixie and Spritle were able to confirm Speed's alibi for the night of the crime.
• Clothing Damage: Speed got his clothing torn in "Crash in the Jungle" after being attacked by animals.
• Convection, Schmonvection: The second part of "The Great Plan," and both parts of "The Fire Race." Both involve the racers driving right next to/over hot lava without so much as a scorch mark.
• Cool Car: Pretty much the whole point of the show. The Mach 5 is not only fast, but it has auto jacks that double as a jumping mechanism, belt tires that allow it to safely drive through any rough terrain as well as sideways, sawblades to cut through heavily-wooded terrain, bulletproof glass, illumination lights that make high beams look dim, the ability to drive across underwater terrain (with periscope!), and a homing robot that can take pictures and send taped messages anywhere.
  • And not just the Mach 5, either. The episode "Gang of Assassins" featured ninja cars.
  • Racer X's signature car, The Shooting Star, is quite impressive, but other than being able to hop similar to the Mach 5's auto-jacks, it doesn't appear to have any special features.
  • In "The Fastest Car in the World," the GRX sends Speed Racer into an acid trip due to its sheer awesomeness.
  • Don't forget "The Mammoth Car," which was basically a rubber-wheeled train. It is made of $50 million worth of solid GOLD, melted down and forged into a motor vehicle.
  • In "The Supersonic Car," the Racer family breaks the land speed record in a rocket car.
  • Every car in the Car Acrobatic Team sprouts little wings that let it stay airborne longer when making a jump. This inspires Pops and Sparky to add similar wings to the Mach 5 to boost its ability to jump with the auto jacks (which were originally not for jumping but just for mid-race maintenance. They actually break the first time Speed uses them to jump and have to be reinforced).
  • In "Mach 5 vs. Mach 5," the Mach 5's Evil Knockoff has full-sized rocket-propelled wings that allow it to fly under its own power, and a Mismo Beam.
• Darkest Africa: The episode "Crash in the Jungle" was set in the jungles of Africa and featured giant animals, a tribe of natives, and a power hungry warlord.
• Decomposite Character: Skull Duggery and Zoomer Slick were originally Genzo Sakai in the Japanese version, Go Mifune's original rival who was only around for four episodes.^note The Duggery was originally the name of his car.
• Digital Destruction:
  • The English episodes released by Speed Racer Enterprises are rendered badly. The framerate and audio is slightly high pitched and faster compared to how it was made originally. This is noticeable if you watch the original Japanese version, or you listen to some of the original soundtrack pieces. The only episodes that are not affected prior to Funimation's releases are the ones released in the 1993 video (these include "The Car Hater" and "The Mammoth Car").
  • The framerate was fixed when Funimation released the series under their belt, but their release has very noticeable audio glitches. "The Great Plan" in particular has the first part obviously time-compressed with a noticeably higher pitched audio from Speed Racer enterprises, and part 2 has a noticeable drop in the audio during the recap. Episode 5 ("The Secret Engine Part 1") also suffers a noticeable audio blip in the first minute and a half of the episode.
• Disney Death: Speed is briefly presumed dead by the rest of the cast towards the end of "Race for Revenge" after failing to stop the Melange. Of course, he turns out to be fine. Flash Marker wasn't as lucky though...
• Dream Sequence: In the episode "Motorcycle Apaches" Spritle falls asleep while driving a wagon and dreams he's a cowboy, getting into gunfights with outlaws in a different art style.
• Driving Up a Wall: The Mach 5 has the B button which deploy belt tires. This can let him drive on walls or near vertical mountain walls.
• Dub Name Change: Pretty much the whole cast got their names localized for the English version. A Latin American adaptation also changed the title (and the title character's name) to "Meteoro".
• Epic Race: The entire show revolves around this premise.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Then again, these are high-performance race cars, and they did explode like that in real life in the 1950s and 60s. There are car crashes in nearly every episode. It is often unclear if the people inside the car survive or not. Sometimes they leave the wreck without a scratch, but other times a comment from a character will suggest that the crash was in fact fatal.
  • Worth of note is in the intro, when Speed collides with another car and it flies off the race track, careening through the air, and crashes with an abnormally big explosion the size of a nuclear blast!
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The villains in "Race The Laser Tank" get buried in fresh hot lava in the titular tank. Even the characters are horrified.
  • Also an Air Traffic Controller dispatched with headphones that administer spikes to the brain, through the ear.
  • A few scattered scenes throughout the series also feature Speed occasionally picking up a Tommy gun and pumping nameless Mooks full of lead.
• Fantastic Drug: In the episode "The Fastest Car on Earth," V Gas is a drug given to racers to improve their reflexes, allowing them to tame the GRX, an engine with incredible power. When the drug leaves the system, the user becomes terrified of even mild speeds.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: In "The Most Dangerous Race in the World", Speed installs miniature retractable wings on the underside of the Mach 5. They are never seen again.
• Free Wheel: A staple. This is a show with "cars crashing spectacularly" as a main attraction, after all.
• Genius Bruiser: Pops Racer/Daisuke Mifune.
• Grand Finale: The final three episodes. "The Trick Race" deals with the Car Arcobatic Team getting revenge on Speed, and Speed finding out whom Racer X is. "The Race Around the World" deals with Speed and Sparky trying to win the race, with the narrator giving a foregone conclusion after Speed won the race.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: In "The Fastest Car on Earth", the "smash intact bottle over head" version is attempted on Pops. Who shrugs it off and throws the poor dumb bastard who tried it across the room. In "Motorcycle Apaches", Spritle and Chim-Chim are able to defeat an enemy spy by throwing bottles at him.
• Hollywood Mirage: In "The Desperate Desert Race," Spritle and Chim-chim become lost in the desert and encounter one of these, jumping into the water and swimming, before they come to their senses and realize they're just rolling in sand.
• Honest John's Dealership: Snake Oiler gives off this vibe, as he's dubbed with a nasally Con Man voice and seems to speak out the corner of his mouth. Not to mention his name. Averted in that he's not a con man so much as a daredevil - but still an arrogant cheater.
• Hong Kong Dub: The dub of the original anime is incredibly infamous, to the point that it's ragged on in anime parodies to this day. Peter Fernandez later revealed he was only given two days to dub each episode: the first day to write and the second to record.
• Hypocrite: The episode "The Car Hater" features Mr. Trotter, a father who reacts to losing his son in a car crash by deciding cars are so dangerous they should all be destroyed. He then proceeds to interrupt a race by riding his horse into the track and hires a bunch of goons to sabotage cars throughout the city in an attempt to prove his point. It isn't until his daughter is almost killed in one of the sabotaged cars and the Mach 5 is the only immediate means of transport to help her to the hospital that Mr. Trotter realizes that he messed up big time.
• Identical Stranger: Spritle is an exact double for Jam, Prince of Saccharin. They switch places of course.
• Invincible Hero: While Speed occasionally loses due to various outstanding circumstances, he only outright loses once in the original series. In "The Snake Track," Rock Force beats him by using his technique of turning corners on two wheels.
  • Although there were a few other races in the later seasons (of the 60s series) that Speed lost because something else came along.
• Invisible Writing: Pops has put the blueprints to the Mach 5 in invisible ink on the windshield of the car.
• It Gets Easier: In one of the typical side-stories, Speed and a bunch of other people get captured by a sociopathic madman who is going to kill them for getting in his way, and the killer says it won't be that difficult, since he's murdered over 4,000 people.
• It Makes Sense in Context: "Speed Racer was disqualified for not having a pineapple in his car, so Hap Hazard wins the race!" Heard in the episode "The Desperate Racer."
• Landmarking the Hidden Base: Villain Cornpone Brotch has a secret base under Mount Rushmore where he keeps an impressive collection stolen art and cars.
• Large Ham: SWEET JE-SUS, so many of the characters are drama queens as a result of the dubbing.
• Light Is Good: The Hero races in the white-racecar, the Mach 5.
• Limited Animation: A big part that of what made the show memorable to most. And also the main point of parody outside of the fast-talking.
• Lip Lock: For the most part, it was mostly done well at the time. According to Peter Fernandez, the team had to make sure their lines go well with the mouth movements, and was tricky due to how they're done differently. There are a few times the characters might say something without their mouths moving, though it's not a big deal since this was also in the original version.
• Little Stowaway: Kurio/Spritle and Sanpei/Chim Chim.
• Long Lost Sibling: Unbeknownst to Speed, Racer X is really his long lost brother, Rex Racer (Ken'ichi Mifune). The Narrator tells the viewer this every chance he gets; or Rex thinks about it where only the viewer can hear.
• Man of a Thousand Voices: The dub cast was made up of four people (one of which, Peter Fernandez, is uncredited for his voice acting role. The studio would only spring for three actors so writer/director Fernandez threw in his voice for free, primarily voicing the title character and Racer X).
• Motor Mouth: The dub is infamous for turning almost everyone into this, mainly because this was the heyday of anime dubbing, and the cast thought they had to keep up with the lip flaps (it doesn't help that Peter Fernandez was only given two days to dub each episode: the first to write the script, and the second to do the actual voice acting). Whenever somebody does a Speed Racer parody, this is always a prerequisite. Though this helps as the series is about racing. This is averted when there are no lip flaps, such as Speed's explanation of the Mach 5s various functions.
• Mr. Fanservice: Again, Speed, and it appears to be genetic, as Rex has a shower scene in his introductory episode!
• Multilayer Façade: In the episode "The Fire Race," Kapetapek's champion race driver, Kabala, is revealed to be Racer X, leading to a scene where Kabala removes his mask and we see he was wearing the Racer X mask underneath.
• Napoleon Delusion: In the episode "Race Against Time," Calcia, the daughter of an archeologist in Egypt, hits her head and beileves herself to be Cleopatra.
• Narrator: For the English dub, a narrator was added for the series.
• Never Say "Die": There are several deaths in the show (not a LOT, mind you) mostly due to crashes and other racing dangers. In the English dub, these people were considered "smashed up," rather than killed.
  • However, there were a few episodes where people die off-screen and they simply don't mention them dying or being smashed up. "The Fire Race" was possibly the worst, since over ninety racers die, some of them in onscreen accidents, too. They also mention people having died in the past, too.
  • Only three people survive the Alpine Race, Speed, Racer X and Snake Oiler, and Snake is (possibly, it's not very clear) killed when his car explodes right before crossing the finish line.
  • "Race for Revenge" has the show's first explicit on-screen death. The arc's antagonist Flash Marker accidentally crashes his helicopter in the process of getting his misguided revenge on the Three Roses Club for crashing his and his sister Lily's father, and when Lily and the rest of the cast examine the wreckage, it's all but stated that he's dead.
  • The bad guys in "The Laser Tank" are killed from the lava, and while they don't say "died", Speed did state that they never made it out, but they paid their horrible actions.
• Ninja: The two-parter "Gang of Assassins" featured these. They even drove ninja cars. (At the time the series was translated into English, most westerners had never heard of ninja, so the word was translated as "assassin.")
• Non-Dubbed Grunts: Chim-Chim's grunts were kept the same for the other dubs, though Jack Grimes added more grunts in the dubs.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Chim-Chim/Sanpei.
• Off-Model: The characters can change proportions, shapes and even partly their art style per cut, which helps lead to some of the more over-the-top and surreal aspects of the series. More than a few cases of Speed's own races and fights have him suffering a Death Glare or a Thousand-Yard Stare at complete random when he's not straight-faced, likely by complete accident.
• One-Man Army: Speed in "The Man Behind The Mask". He machine-guns his way through the titular villain's private army in order to foil his plot.
• One, Two, Three, Four, Go!: Mach Five was originally called the "Mach Go-Go" in Japan.
• Papa Wolf: Pops Racer. Mess with his kids? If they don't kick your ass, he will.
• Pink Means Feminine: Trixie wears a pink top.
• Piranha Problem: In the episode "Crash in the Jungle," the villain threatens to lower Trixie and Spritle into a tank of piranhas, then demonstrates how dangerous they are by throwing a lion into the tank. The lion is reduced to bones in seconds.
• Pop the Tires: Attempted on the Mammoth car. It has so many tires that it didn't have any effect.
• Practically Different Generations: The gap between Rex and Spritle is pretty substantial. Rex's current age is never given, but it's said he was 18 when he ran away from home (the same age Speed is in the show) and it's been at least a few years since then. Spritle is around 8. It is probably safe to say that Rex is nearly two decades older than his youngest brother.
• Prince and Pauper: In the episode "The Royal Racer," Spritle switches places with Identical Stranger Jam, Prince of Saccharin.
• Protagonist Title: In the dub, the main character's name is Speed Racer. In the original Japanese his name is Go Mifune.
• Punny Name: Particularly with the bad guys.
• Ramp Jump: True to their name, these are the kind of antics the Car Acrobat Team (from "The Most Dangerous Race") do.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Inspector Detector.
• Red Shirt: Most of the unnamed racers are destined to crash, with their cars comedically falling apart at best and gloriously exploding into balls of fire at worst. Any of the unnamed racers who don't crash are usually those who gave up.
• Rule of Three: When Speed car-chases the villains, their dashboards always have three buttons for weapons to try to kill him.
• Same Content, Different Rating: The series was always intended as a children's program regardless what changes were made in the American dub, as Cartoon Network rated it as TV-Y/TV-G and the DVDs released by Lionsgate were not rated. When Funimation remastered the series however, the rating on the DVD was changed to TV-PG, despite the fact there was no change in the content and there's no swearing in the English dub. It's most likely due to the violence such as the usage of guns and crashes (that's even if the dub just states that the victims are just hurt).
• The Scrooge: Baron von Vondervon.
• Sequel Episode: The penultimate episode "The Trick Race" has Speed reuniting with the Car Acrobatic Team from "The Most Dangerous Race" who want revenge against Speed for beating them in the latter episode as well as supposedly causing Snake Oiler's death.
• Serious Business: Racing.
• Silly Simian: Chim-Chim is a chimpanzee that Sprtile's pet. Spritle Chim-Chim are forever getting into trouble and act as a source of comic relief for the show.
• Sinister Car: There exists, not a sinister car, but a sinister engine, the GRX, which is so powerful that anyone who drives a car using it inevitably crashes.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: "Race for Revenge" ends with Speed failing to stop Flash Marker's revenge plot as he had successfully wrecked the cars of two members of the Three Roses Club, killing them, only for Flash himself to crash into the side of a cliff in the process and die. Also, nobody wins this episode's race.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Speed and Trixie encountered one in "The Race against Time", and it tried to attack Speed. Trixie had to use the gun from the dead gunman to shoot it.
• Soap Opera Disease: In the episode "The Desperate Racer," Hap Hazard desperately wants to win a race so that he can cure his sick sister Eloisa. What sickness Eloisa has is not elaborated upon.
• Speed Stripes: To save on animation, there are countless shots of characters not moving, placed in front of a background of speed stripes.
• Spiked Wheels: Crop up from time to time, most notably on the cars used by Ace Deucey's gang in "The Great Plan".
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: When your name is Speed Racer, there's really only one job you can have. Averted in the Japanese version either way with more "normal" name of Go Mifune.
  • Not to mention Pops Racer and Inspector Detector, and one-time characters like Snake Oiler, Hap Hazard, Vice President Duper...
• Switching To GEICO: This 2005 Geico ad.
• Tagalong Kid: Spritle/Kurio.
• Title Sequence Replacement: When Speed Racer Enterprises took over the English rights of the anime, they replaced the intro's logo with their take of it, and changed the fonts of the title cards and credits. Funimation kept a mixture of the two. The credits and title cards were remade for HD in a font similar to Enterprises (correcting their "Crimes" typo on Jack Grimes' credit), but the intro's logo was kept from Trans-Lux, minus the copyright year.
• Transforming Vehicle: The Mach 5 has equipment that allows it to turn into a Flying Car or a hover car (on water) when needed.
• Weaponized Car: A subversion since it's technically not "weaponized" per se. The Mach 5 sported pneumatic jump-jacks (button "A"; actually for easy access to the underside of the car for maintenance), a retractable bulletproof canopy (button "D"), rotary saw blades (button "C"; for cutting wooden obstacles), traversible infrared headlights (button "E"), deploy-able tire armor (button "B"; actually for climbing steeper roads), underwater operational capability (button "F"), and a remote-controlled robot homing pigeon (button "G") with a single button to enable automatic flight home (button "H" in the joystick box). (And, in "The Most Dangerous Race in the World", extendable mini-wings which increased its jumping distance.)
  • In "Mach 5 vs. Mach 5", the evil clone Mach 5 also sported full-sized flying wings (with rocket assist) and a Death Ray called the "Mismo Beam."

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"He's up and flyin' as he guns the car around the track
He's jammin' down the pedal like he's never comin' back
Adventure's waitin' just AHEAAAAAD!
Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer!
Go, Speed Racer, GO!!"

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