It has been a long wait, but the final eight episodes of Speed Racer are finally available on DVD.  This fifth volume comes out an amazing three and a half years after the release of the first volume (way back in April of 2003) and I'm sure a lot of fans were wondering if the entire series would ever come out.  Luckily it has, since this series is just as much fun now as it was 35 years ago when it was first released.  Yes, it's a bit corny and laughable in parts, but the show has so much action and runs along at such a fast clip that it's easy to ignore the imperfections.

Series Background:

Though it wasn't the first Japanese cartoon to be shown in the US, Speed Racer was the first to become extremely popular.  Released in Japan as Mach Go Go Go!, Trans Lux, the company the brought Gigantor to the States, bought the rights and translated it into English.  The man behind the show though was Peter Fernandez.  He wrote the scripts, edited and directed the shows and even provided the voice for Speed and Racer X.  This one man production team was really responsible for giving Speed Racer the feel that it had in its American incarnation.

The show is about Speed Racer, a young professional race car driver who pilots the coolest car ever:  The Mach 5.  This car is an ingenious and speedy machine that was designed and built by his father, Pops Racer, with some help from their mechanic Sparky.  In addition to traveling at high velocities, the Mach 5 has a number of unique inventions that allows it to jump over obstacles, cut down trees in its path, travel underwater, and even get traction in any terrain.  With this car, Speed is almost unbeatable.

Speed is accompanied on his journeys by his girl friend Trixie and his brother Spritle and Spritle's pet monkey Chim-Chim.  Together the group always seems to find trouble while attending a race, and Speed isn't one to back down from a fight or ignore an injustice.

The show is really action packed, and the story travels at a fast pace.  Even the people talk fast in this show.  This was really so they could fit all of the dialog into the space where the cartoon character was moving his mouth, but it had the nice side effect of making the show seem even faster paced than it was.  There is often little time wasted on background stories at the beginning, they'll start Speed off racing down a speedway and fill in the rest as they went along.

Even the opening of the show was fast paced.  Starting off with fast staccato of notes followed by the revving of a car engine as it roars to life, the song was accented by trumpet blast and simple lyrics making it one of the most insanely catchy theme songs ever produced.  The opening credits showed cars racing along, getting into accidents and crashing with tires flying over the other racers.  Within 30 seconds of the show starting, you knew you were in for a wild ride.

The show was a 'villain of the week' type program, where Speed would encounter a some crooks with a nefarious scheme and had to bring them to justice and win a race all at the same time.  Roughly half of the shows were two part episodes with the rest telling the story in a single episode.  The double shows are easily my favorite, since the first show would always end with a nail biting cliff hanger, often showing Speed and the Mach 5 plunging off a cliff towards certain doom.
 

The emphasis in the shows is on getting the bad guys.  The races were only the backdrop, but they did add a lot of excitement.  Speed would take time out of a race to fight a villain or rescue a damsel, then hop in the Mach 5 and miraculously catch up to the other drivers.  Implausible as it was, it Speed often came in first, but just barely.

This volume:

As with the other volumes, this disc has some fun, if hokey episodes.  This time we get to see Speed enter the Mach 5 in a demolition derby, battle a motorcycle gang in the American desert, and even get stuck on a deserted island.   All the episodes on this disc have self-contained stories with the exception of the series finale which covers two shows.

One of the better episodes is The Car with a Brain where Speed goes up against a sentient car.  Not only that, but an evil sentient car that kidnaps a small girl.  This installment is just weird enough to be a lot of fun.  Another great episode is The Trick Race.  This is a sequel to the episode The Most Dangerous Race (which was presented on an earlier volume), and has Speed getting tricked by some spies into racing against the Car Acrobatic Team.  The spies have figured out that Racer X is really Speed's long lost brother, and hope to lure him out by putting young Speed in danger.  The plan doesn't work of course, but it does start the gears turning in Speed's brain, and he starts to suspect just exactly who Racer X is.

The series ends with the two-part Race Around the World, the greatest race ever run.  When the richest man in the world, Mr. Goldminter, offers a "mountain of gold" to the winner of an around the world 25,000 mile race, all of the top drivers in the world enter.  To make the race even more exciting, Goldminter announces that the winner of the race gets the hand of his daughter, Lovelace, in marriage.  No one asked Lovelace however, and so she dresses up like a guy (since females obviously can't drive cars) and enters the race herself.  With so much at stake though, several of the drivers are willing to cheat in order to win, though Speed refuses to use such tactics.

This was an exciting story with a lot of exotic locales and some fun race cars.  The story has everything including Speed getting into a fight with a killer shark armed with only a knife.  It was also amusing that no one suspected that Lovelace was really a girl.  She has breasts for heaven's sake!  I know the racers are concentrating on the race, but you'd think that someone would notice that one of the racers was really hot.

This final story also wraps up the series to some extent.  When you think back to the very first episodes where Speed was begging pops to let him enter races you can see that there's a nice story arc over the entire series, and it ends nicely.

The episodes included on this disc are:

45.  Great Car Wrestling Match
46.  Motorcycle Apaches
47.  Car with a Brain
48.  Junk Car Grand Prix
49.  The Car in the Sky
50.  The Trick Race
51.  Race Around the World (Part 1)
52.  Race Around the World (Part 2)

Like the previous volumes, the initial release of this disc comes with limited edition packaging.  This disc comes with a mini metal license plate enclosed in the DVDs slipcover.  The DVD itself is housed in a standard keepcase and does not come with an insert.

Audio:

The two channel English mono soundtrack is a little bit better than you would expect for a 60's kid show.  There isn't any hiss or background noise, but the dialog did have some distortion.  This wasn't particularly bothersome, but I was hoping for a bit better.  The dynamic range is not as wide as current shows but that=s to be expected.  There are no subtitles.

Video:

The full frame video looks very good for a cartoon of this age.  The colors are very bright and vivid, and the lines are sharp.  The prints used did have some minor defects, the occasional line or spot on the film, but these were fairly rare.  There was also a bit of grain in some scenes.  There is no edge enhancement, and the only digital defect is some light aliasing in the background.

The only thing that is really wrong is that they've replaced the Speed Racer logo at the beginning with a modern computer generated one.  This is a minor, though easily avoidable, flaw.

Extras:

Unfortunately this disc doesn't have any extras.  A commentary track by the surviving voice actors would have been great, especially if they didn't limit themselves to one episode and reminisced about the entire series.  I guess we can keep our fingers crossed that they'll include something like that on the last disc.

Final Thoughts:

A great disc for both young children and adults who remembered watching this series years ago, this aged has aged well and is still a lot of fun to watch.  My two boys, aged 10 and 14, really had fun watching it and was sad that there wasn't any more, almost as sad as their father was.  This disc gets a strong Recommendation.