Creator/author Tony Caputo saw our article on the run-up to the release of Speed Racer (see “Speed Racer Could Face a Bump in the Road Today”), and sent us his perspective on the potential audience and how they may respond:

I’ve been called by a few newspaper reporters, who must have opened up one of their Speed Racer comic books from their collection and saw my name inside.  They wanted my opinion about the comics, the anime and the movie and I told them, “I’m sorry, but that’s ancient history.  I’m no longer involved with Speed Racer, so I have no comment about it.”

However, after reading your article "'Speed Racer' Could Face a Bump in the Road" today, my first reaction was to snicker, and I thought, “Oh, My.  They are going to be very surprised.”  Then, as I read further, trying to digest how the “analysts” were so ridiculously off-track (no pun intended) that I suddenly found myself launching Microsoft Word and started typing.

The generation that watched Speed Racer as a child in the 1960s and 1970s doesn’t see Speed Racer as “anime.”  That’s what it’s called now, but there was once a time when it was something so profoundly different from the other cartoons on the air that we all couldn’t wait to race (again, no pun intended) home to watch it.  The quality, the gadgets, the cars, the wicked evildoers and the out of this world races were all part of its charm.  We later learned it was a “Japanese animation.”  Groovy!  The country that gave us Godzilla knows how to really make cartoons!

Alan Enterprises, the company that syndicated the show in the USA back in the 1960s offered the stations that purchased its broadcast rights unlimited play time.  In many urban areas throughout the USA, Speed Racer played two or three times a day for years (up until the late 1970s in San Francisco), while in other areas of the country, no one ever heard of it.  This is what the late NOW Comics uncovered while publishing the monthly comic book for almost a decade.

The funny thing about this little “Japanese Animation” was the fact that even the security guards at the larger, urban comic book conventions were bigger fans of the fondly remembered show than the actual comic book fans.  That is, of course, if they grew up in that large urban area, and not rural Kansas, Montana or Wisconsin.  Further analysis uncovered that Speed Racer sold ten times better on the newsstand in urban cities than any rural area in the USA, where it mostly collected dust.

If Warner Bros. is using Nielsen ratings or any other rural America analytic group to judge the success of “its garish, neon-bright live action Speed Racer movie,” then they didn’t really do their homework and I hope, for the sake of John and Jim Rocknowski (of Speed Racer Enterprises), and the wonderful Wachowski brothers, that those 3,600 movie theatres soon to be playing Speed Racer are in those urban areas whose children (now parents themselves) grew up watching the show.  Isn’t that Hollywood’s formula for successful family movies?  Produce something that the parents know, love and understand, and need not worry taking their kids to see?

Parents now have the joyous opportunity of taking their children on the awesome adventure ride (pun intended) that is the Speed Racer universe, and reliving it again themselves.  Bump in the Road?  Go, Speed Racer, Go!

The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.