Wacky Races

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Dick Dastardly and Muttley, the villains of Wacky Races, in their car, the "Mean Machine."
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Dick Dastardly and Muttley, the villains of Wacky Races, in their car, the "Mean Machine."

Wacky Races is an American animated television series from Hanna-Barbera Productions, about a group of 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies, with each driver hoping to win the title of the "World's Wackiest Racer." The cartoon was unusual in the large number of regular characters, twenty-three in total.

The series was inspired by the movie The Great Race. The series ran on CBS from September 14, 1968 to September 5, 1970. Seventeen episodes were produced with each episode featuring two different races for a total of 34 races in all.

Attempting to foil the racers' efforts was the show's resident stereotyped villain Dick Dastardly and his sidekick, Muttley the dog. Dastardly would gain a large lead then, like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, execute all sorts of elaborate schemes to trap, divert, blow up or stop the other racers, only to see them backfire spectacularly. The intended object lesson may have been that Dastardly had what was arguably one of the fastest cars in the series and might have won several races had he only kept his mind on the race and off dirty tricks. Like Wile E Coyote, Dastardly never saw victory. Many of Dastardly's plots look suspiciously similar to those used in Road Runner episodes, which might be explained by the fact that Mike Maltese was a scriptwriter on both series.

One of the original plans for the series was that the races themselves would be part of a live-action quiz show with Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions, the team behind the television series Hollywood Squares. Heatter-Quigley's plan was that contestants would actually bet on which Wacky Racer would cross the finish line first. Although the game show concept was eventually scrubbed, the series still retained a Hanna-Barbera Heatter-Quigley dual production credit.

In 1988, a made-for-TV movie, "Around The World With The Wacky Racers" was planned as part of Hanna-Barbera's Superstars 10 series of TV movies but it never got past the concept stage.

Contents

[edit] The Cars and Drivers

The eleven racers and their numbers are:

  • 00: Dick Dastardly and Muttley in The Mean Machine. The villains of the series, in a rocket-powered car with lots of concealed weapons.
  • 01: The Slag Brothers (Rock Slag and Gravel Slag) in The Bouldermobile. Cavemen (covered with hair like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family; their design was recycled for Captain Caveman) driving a wheeled boulder. The Slag Brothers sometimes reconstructed their car from scratch just by using their clubs on any large boulder that was available. On one occasion the car was shown to be using an unseen, living creature as its engine.
  • 02: The Gruesome Twosome (Big Gruesome and Little Gruesome) in the Creepy Coupe. Monsters (Big spoke like Boris Karloff and Little like Peter Lorre), driving a car with a belfry which housed a dragon and various ghosts/ creatures/ witches on broomsticks etc. The Creepy Coupe was able to fly short distances through use of the dragon's wings and has bats constantly circling the bellfry.
  • 03: Professor Pat Pending in the Convert-a-Car. A scientist in a car that can change into just about anything that moves.
  • 04: Red Max in the Crimson Haybailer. An air ace (loosely based on WWI German aviator, Max Immelmann) in a car/plane hybrid that was capable of limited flight, usually just enough to leapfrog over racers or obstacles in its path. The Haybailer also had a machine gun mounted, which was sporadically used.
  • 05: Penelope Pitstop in the Compact Pussycat. A female racer driving a pink feminine car with personal grooming facilities which would sometimes backfire on the other racers, shampoo foam hitting the faces of the other racers, for instance.
  • 06: Sergeant Blast & Private Meekly in the Army Surplus Special. Two soldiers racing an army tank/jeep hybrid. The Army Surplus Special made use of its tank facilities while racing, including its cannon.
  • 07: The Ant Hill Mob in the Bulletproof Bomb (aka the Roaring Plenty), led by Clyde, with Danny, Kurby, Mac, Ring-A-Ding, Rug Bug Benny, and Willy. Gangsters in a 1920s saloon car. They re-appeared with the wingmen wearing blue outfits and had name changes ( Dum Dum, Pockets, Snoozy, Softy, Yak Yak, and Zippy) and also a new living car Chugga-Boom in the spinoff The Perils of Penelope Pitstop.
  • 08: Luke and Blubber Bear in the Arkansas Chuggabug. A hillbilly who sleeps during most of the races and a nervous bear in a wooden buggy driven by a coal-fired range.
  • 09: Peter Perfect in the Turbo Terrific. A jock (he had a crush on Penelope, so often stopped to help) driving a drag racer that often falls to bits. In development, the car was called the Varoom Roadster, a name used in the Gold Keybcomic book series.
  • 10: Rufus Ruffcut and Sawtooth in the Buzz Wagon. A lumberjack and a beaver in a wagon with buzzsaws for wheels, which gave it the ability to cut through almost anything, damaging or destroying the object in the process.

[edit] Spinoffs and similar series

The Penelope Pitstop and Ant Hill Mob characters were spun off into another cartoon series in 1969, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. Also in 1969, Dick Dastardly and Muttley were given a spinoff; the two villains appeared in the series Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines (sometimes mistakenly known as Stop the Pigeon, after the show's working title and theme song).

The basic idea behind Wacky Races was used again by Hanna-Barbera in later years. The late 1970s series Yogi's Space Race featured Hanna-Barbera stalwarts such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and others racing against each other across outer space (and fending off a villain and his canine sidekick). In the early 1990s, the syndicated series Wake, Rattle and Roll featured a segment called "Fender Bender 500," which once again featured Dick Dastardly and Muttley (and their "Mean Machine"), only this time racing against Yogi Bear, Winsome Witch, Quick Draw McGraw and other Hanna-Barbera stars.

A video game was produced in 1992 for the NES, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in which the player took the role of Muttley, sent on missions from Dick Dastardly to defeat the other racers. A Mega Drive/Sega Genesis game was intended to be released, but it was canned in development. In 2000, more video games based on the cartoon were produced for the PC, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Game Boy Color and Sega Dreamcast systems. These were racing games. Voices for the video games' renditions of the characters included Jim Cummings as Dick Dastardly, Clyde, Private Meekly, Big Gruesome, Rock Slag, and Gravel Slag; Billy West as Muttley and Little Gruesome, Janet Waldo as Penelope Pitstop, John Stephenson as Luke, Scott Innes as Professor Pat Pending, Gregg Berger as the narrator, and Gregg Burson as the Red Max, Sergeant Blast, Peter Perfect, and Ruffus Ruffcut.

[edit] DVD Release

[edit] Japan

A boxed-set 3-DVD release of the complete series was made available in Japan on August 10, 2001. The set had both English and Japanese audio.[1]

[edit] United States

Warner Home Video released the entire series, with commentaries and other extras, in a DVD box set on October 26, 2004.

[edit] United Kingdom

In Britain Warner released the series on three separate discs with no extra features. This edition was exclusive to Virgin Megastores, from the time it was released to when it was discontinued. The complete box set of 'Wacky Races' which has until now only been available in the U.S. was released on the 31st July 2006 as a HMV exclusive - but is essentially the standard volumes I, II, and III in their respective cases, with no extras, in a sleeve.

[edit] Race results

The show gave the results of each race at the end of each episode, but never indicated a particular scoring system or way to determine who won the Wacky Races as a whole. The cumulative totals for first, second and third place finishes for each contestant are presented below:

Contestant Results
The Boulder Mobile 3-8-3
The Buzzwagon 3-6-4
The Creepy Coupe 3-3-6
The Bulletproof Bomb 4-5-2
The Compact Pussycat 4-2-5
The Crimson Haybailer 3-4-3
The Convert-A-Car 3-2-5
The Arkansas Chugabug 4-1-4
The Turbo Terrific 4-2-2
The Army Surplus Special 3-1-0
The Mean Machine 0-0-0

If using current Formula1 point system (up to 2006, and taking only first three spots), the results of a championship with 34 races would be this:

Contestant Results
The Boulder Mobile 112 pts
The Buzzwagon 102 pts
The Bulletproof Bomb 92 pts
The Creepy Coupe 90 pts
The Compact Pussycat 86 pts
The Crimson Haybailer 80 pts
The Convert-A-Car 76 pts
The Arkansas Chugabug 72 pts
The Turbo Terrific 68 pts
The Army Surplus Special 38 pts
The Mean Machine 0 points

[edit] Voice cast

[edit] Cultural references / precursors

  • Certain characters in the cartoon are clearly based on characters in Blake Edwards' The Great Race (1965). Penelope Pitstop took on the appearance of Maggie DuBois, played by Natalie Wood, down to the exact shade of pink on one of her outfits and the parasol. Dastardly has much in common with Jack Lemmon's portrayal of Professor Fate - though he has a non-canine sidekick in the form of Max Meen (Peter Falk). The pair indulge in similar acts of sabotage and Max has Muttley's knack for making mistakes. Although Fate's car does not look much like The Mean Machine it does bear the familiar spike on the front and is equipped with smoke screen, cannon and other assorted gadgets. The physical similarities, particularly between DuBois and Pitstop, can be seen from the cover of the DVD (right).
  • Underground rapper Daniel Dumile makes a reference to "Dick Dastardly and Muttley with sick laughter" in the song "Accordion" on his collaboration album Madvillainy with producer Madlib.
  • Underground rapper Saafir on the song "Swig of the Stew" from his debut album 'Boxcar Sessions', claims that "Dick Dastardly could never've mastered me".
  • Wacky Races has also had an influence on Japanese animation. At least three anime shows have produced a Wacky Races-style special, complete with wacky cars usually based on a series prop. During the '80s, animation production house Artmic (now AIC) produced Scramble Wars, starring the super deformed versions of characters from Bubblegum Crisis, Gall Force and other shows that Artmic created. Bandai animation house Sunrise produced a similar special, as part of the SD Gundam OVA series of self-parodies of Sunrise's Gundam series. This is perhaps the most direct homage to Wacky Races, as the episode transforms one of the characters, the mad ace Yazan Gable of Zeta Gundam, into a clear Dick Dastardly homage (including oversized chin) and another villain as his Muttley-esque sidekick, complete with a dog-like snout and a raspy, hushed laugh. In 1993, Tatsunoko Productions released a Wacky Races-styled OVA special featuring the characters from the popular and long running Time Bokan franchise and its spinoffs, Yattaman, Zendaman, and Otasukeman.
  • The animated series Dexter's Laboratory featured a parody of Wacky Races in the episode "Dexter's Wacky Races," featuring the show's major cast members (Dexter, Mandark, Mandark's mother and father, Dexter's mother and father, Dee Dee and Koosy , Monkey and Agent Honeydew, and the Justice Friends) racing against each other in a road rally to Burbank, California. The opening credits of Wacky Races and the show's narrator are also parodied here.
  • German Formula One driver Michael Schumacher has been nicknamed Dick Dastardly by some journalists covering F1 races not only because of his prominent chin but also those controversial maneuvers which have thrown faster cars off the track.
  • Brazilian band Irmãos Rocha is named after the Slag Brothers. Irmãos Rocha means literally "Rock Brothers", and Rocha is a common surname in Brazil.
  • In ReBoot, season 3, Cyrus reboots as a parody toy of Dick Dastardly and Frisket reboots as a parody toy of Muttley.

[edit] Wacky Races in other languages

[edit] External links

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