Wacky Races is an American animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions. The series, inspired by the 1965 slapstick comedy film The Great Race, features 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies throughout North America, with each driver hoping to win the title of the "World's Wackiest Racer."
The cartoon had a large number of regular characters, with 23 people and animals spread among the 11 race cars. Wacky Races ran on CBS from September 14, 1968, to January 4, 1969. 17 episodes were produced, with each episode featuring two different races.
Video Wacky Races
Plot
The villain of the series drives a purple, rocket-powered car with an abundance of concealed weapons and the ability to fly. Dick Dastardly is an archetypal mustache-twirling villain; Muttley is his wheezily snickering dog henchman. Dastardly's usual race strategy revolves around using the Mean Machine's great speed to get ahead of the other racers, and then setting a trap to stop them and maintain the lead; but most of his plans backfire, causing him to fall back into last place. Dastardly never sees victory.
The other racers include
- The Slag Brothers, Rock and Gravel, in a cavemen-themed racer called The Boulder Mobile;
- The Gruesome Twosome, who are monsters in The Creepy Coupe;
- Professor Pat Pending, a scientist, in The Convert-a-Car;
- Red Max in a car/plane hybrid; called The Crimson Haybailer
- Penelope Pitstop, the lone female, in a 1930s racing costume in The Compact Pussycat;
- Sergeant Blast, and Private Meekly in an army tank/jeep hybrid with a small steamroller wheel attached to the front, called The Army Surplus Special;
- The Ant Hill Mob, gangsters, in The Bulletproof Bomb;
- Lazy Luke, a hillbilly, and Blubber Bear, in The Arkansas Chugabug;
- Peter Perfect, a gentlemanly racer, in The Turbo Terrific; and finally
- Rufus Ruffcut, a lumberjack, and his companion Sawtooth, a beaver, in The Buzzwagon.
Maps Wacky Races
Production
One of the unused plans for the series was that the races would be part of a live-action quiz show made by Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions in which contestants would bet on which Wacky Racer would cross the finish line first. Although the game show concept was eventually scrapped, 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.
Voice cast
- Paul Winchell - Dick Dastardly, Private Meekly, Clyde
- Don Messick - Muttley, Professor Pat Pending, Gravel Slag, Little Gruesome, Ring-a-Ding, Sawtooth
- Daws Butler - Rock Slag, Big Gruesome, Red Max, Sergeant Blast, Peter Perfect, Rufus Ruffcut
- John Stephenson - Luke, Blubber Bear
- Janet Waldo - Penelope Pitstop
- Dave Willock - Narrator
Episodes
Race results
The show gave the results of each race at the end of each episode, (the first, second, and third placings are given by the narrator, and we sometimes saw some or all of the other cars cross the finish line). The show 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:
Spin-offs and similar series
Penelope Pitstop and the Ant Hill Mob were spun off into another cartoon series in 1969 titled The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. In the same year, Dick Dastardly and Muttley were given a spin-off series titled Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. The series is sometimes mistakenly known as Stop the Pigeon, after the show's working title and theme song. Both series ran for two seasons.
In 2006, the pilot for a spin-off series titled Wacky Races Forever was produced for Cartoon Network. The series depicted a roster of both new and returning racers competing against each other. Penelope Pitstop and Peter Perfect had married and created Perfect Industries, the corporate sponsor of the new Wacky Races, whereas their children Parker and Piper competed in the race. Other characters included the Slag Brothers, Professor Pat Pending, a teenage version of the Gruesome Twosome, and Dick Dastardly and Muttley (working for a new villain named Mr. Viceroy, who sought to steal Perfect Industries). The series was not picked up by Cartoon Network for the reasons that the traditional humor the pilot had was not what newer generation of kids want.
In 2016, DC Comics launched a comic series called Wacky Raceland. It is a dark and gritty re-imagining of the series set after the apocalypse in a similar vein to the Mad Max franchise. The comic ran for six issues from May to December 2016.
A reboot - also produced by Hanna-Barbera - was released on Boomerang's SVOD service in 2017. It also aired on the Boomerang channel in June 2017.
Video games
Various video games based on the series have been produced.
- Wacky Races (1991)
- Wacky Races (2000)
- Wacky Races Starring Dastardly and Muttley
- Wacky Races: Mad Motors
- Wacky Races: Crash and Dash
Later in 2007, another game called Wacky Races: Mad Motors for the PlayStation 2 was released by Blast Entertainment on June 12. A new video game for the Wii and Nintendo DS consoles titled Wacky Races: Crash and Dash was released on June 27, 2008. This game was developed by Eidos.
Home Media releases
A three-disc DVD release of the complete series was made available in Japan on August 10, 2001, and had both English and Japanese audio. In Britain Warner released a three-disc set with no extra features, which was only available in Virgin Megastores. The complete box set of Wacky Races was released on July 31, 2006 as an HMV exclusive but is essentially the standard Volumes 1-3 with no extras. The Australian release of Volume 1 and 2 was made available in 2005 and Volume 3 released in 2007.
Warner Home Video released the entire series, with commentaries and other extras, in a DVD box set on October 26, 2004.
A two and a half-hour VHS video was made available in 1996.
All 34 episodes can be purchased on the iTunes Store.
On February 14, 2017, Warner Archive re-released Wacky Races: The Complete Series on DVD in region 1 as part of their Hanna-Barbera Classics Collection as a Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) release.
Non-English language titles
- Bosnian: Uvrnute trke (Strange racing)
- Catalan: Els cotxes esbojarrats (The bumpy cars)
- French: Les Fous du volant (The Fools of the Wheel)
- Frisian: Hotse-knotse-kneuzen-rally (Rally of hot knees)
- Galician: Os tolos do volante (The crazy people of the steering wheel)
- German: Autorennen Total (Total car race)
- Hungarian: Flúgos futam (Flush race)
- Italian: Le corse pazze (The crazy races)
- Japanese: ??????????? - Chikichikimashin m? r?su (Chiki Chiki Racing Machines)
- Polish: Odlotowe wy?cigi (Exhaust racing)
- Portuguese:
- Portugal: A Mais Louca Corrida do Mundo (The Crazy Race of the World)
- Brazil: Corrida Maluca (Crazy Race)
- Romanian: Curse Tr?snite (Heavy Races)
- Spanish: Los autos locos (The crazy cars)
- Serbian: ??????? ???? (Strange racing)
- Swedish: Fartdårarna (Speed freaks)
The cars and characters in other media
Life-size working replicas of the vehicles have been built in the UK (where the show was very popular) and appear annually at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, with new additions each year. 2008 saw the last of the cars (the Ant Hill Mob in the Bulletproof Bomb 07) added to the collection, making a complete set.
- Goodwood Festival of Speed Wacky Races Replicas
In 2006, the car manufacturer Vauxhall launched a TV commercial for the British market, parodying Wacky Races with a similar setup featuring Corsa cars. The commercial made several references to the cartoon as well as utilizing the show's theme music and Muttley's iconic laugh.
The English adult comic Viz had a one-off parody strip called "Wacky Racists" with David Irving as Dick Dastardly, Unity Mitford as Penelope Pitstop and comedian Bernard Manning as Muttley.
In 2013, the car manufacturer Peugeot launched a TV commercial for the Brazilian market (and later used in Spain and Turkey), featuring the cartoon characters in a real-life universe.
See also
- List of works produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions
- List of Hanna-Barbera characters
References
External links
- It's the Wacky Races!
- Wacky Races on IMDb
- Wacky Races at TV.com
- Cartoon Network: DOC - Wacky Races - cached copy from Internet Archives
- The Cartoon Scrapbook - Profile on Wacky Races
- Wacky Races on Flickr
- Wacky Races on Watch Cartoon Online
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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