I wasn’t a car kid. I didn’t have Hot Wheels lining my shelves or posters of Lamborghinis on my bedroom wall. But I had an uncle with a VHS collection that included a taped-off-TV copy of Speed Racer, and something about that white car with the red M on the hood grabbed me in a way I still can’t fully explain.
Maybe it was the steering wheel. Seven buttons, each one doing something ridiculous. Auto-jacks that launched the car over obstacles. Saw blades that popped out of the front end. A bird-shaped drone hidden under the hood. In 1967. Tatsuo Yoshida watched Goldfinger and Viva Las Vegas and thought, “What if James Bond’s Aston Martin was also an Elvis movie?” And somehow that worked.
Mach GoGoGo premiered on Fuji TV on April 2, 1967, animated by Tatsunoko Production. The setup is straightforward: young Gō Mifune (Speed, in the English dub) races the Mach 5, a car built by his father, Pops. His girlfriend Trixie flies a helicopter as his spotter. His kid brother Spritle and a chimpanzee named Chim-Chim hide in the trunk. And his mysterious rival, Racer X, is actually his estranged older brother Rex — a secret the show treats with zero subtlety but still manages to make compelling.
What got me watching as a kid wasn’t the racing, though. It was the villains. Speed Racer has some genuinely unhinged antagonists. The Mammoth Car, a massive 200-foot-long vehicle hauling stolen gold, felt like something out of a fever dream. The GRX engine killed every driver who tested it because it was too fast for human reflexes, so they invented a serum to sharpen your senses that also made you deathly afraid of speed if you drank water. That’s not a kids’ show plot. That’s a Philip K. Dick short story crammed into 22 minutes.
The animation is limited. You’ll see the same three explosion frames recycled across episodes. Characters’ mouths sometimes move when nobody’s talking. But the action sequences have a kinetic energy that holds up. The car flips, the cliff-edge near-misses, the Mach 5 tearing through forests with its cutter blades spinning. Art director Mitsuki Nakamura designed the Mach 5 by studying Porsches, Ferraris, and Jaguars, and you can feel that real-world grounding in every frame. The car looks fast standing still.
Here’s the thing about Speed Racer that doesn’t get talked about enough: it arrived in America in the summer of 1967, airing simultaneously with its Japanese broadcast. That almost never happened back then. Astro Boy had crossed over a few years earlier, and Kimba the White Lion was making the rounds, but Speed Racer hit different. It pulled an estimated 40 million American viewers. For a lot of people in the late ’60s and ’70s, this was anime — they just didn’t have a word for it yet.
Peter Fernandez adapted the English version practically by himself. He wrote the dialogue, directed the dub, and voiced both Speed and Racer X. The man talked to himself for 52 episodes, and the result became so iconic that people quote the theme song without knowing they’re quoting a Japanese show.
I rewatched the series last year, and I’ll be honest. Some episodes drag. The formula repeats: a race, a villain with a scheme, the Mach 5 gets wrecked, Speed wins anyway. But when the show locks in, when the GRX engine is pushing a gold car to 250 mph or Racer X is deliberately losing a race to protect his brother without saying why, there’s a sincerity to it that modern shows don’t bother with. Nobody involved was being ironic. They meant every ridiculous second of it.
The Wachowskis clearly agreed. Their 2008 live-action film kept the Mach 5’s design almost unchanged from Nakamura’s 1967 original. Forty years later, and it still looked right. The movie flopped, but I respect anyone who watches it and walks away thinking, “Speed Racer deserved better.” It did.
If you’ve never watched the original and you’re curious? Funimation put out a Blu-ray in 2017 that includes both the English dub and the Japanese audio for the first time in North America. It’s worth hearing it both ways. The English version is pure nostalgia fuel. The Japanese version is a reminder that Gō Mifune was named after Toshiro Mifune, and Trixie’s surname is a nod to Takashi Shimura. Yoshida was building a mythology.
Go, Speed Racer. Go.