zyrcona

This film is all right. It more or less makes sense, there's nothing really terrible about it, and I didn't lose my rag while watching it. The problem is that it's an Indiana Jones plot that's been given an enema made of classic cartoon characters.

I was never really a fan of Scooby Doo. I certainly saw them but the characters never really resonated with me. That's not to say they weren't good cartoons, as from what I remember they were more mature than most of the stuff at the time and the point was a sort of reverse X-files, that the characters would investigate and disprove things like hauntings and ghosts. Considering ghost stories have not been a big thing for a while (apart from the remake of Ghostbusters which was too bad to count) and the problems with disinformation and misinformation and hoaxes that are part of life today, this idea seems ripe for reinvention. Only they didn't do that and the plot has nothing to do with it, and is an Indiana Jones fantasy McGuffin collection quest race. The fans of the original show who are complaining are justified in doing so.

Then, rather than featuring the characters from Scooby Doo, they pretty much disappear, to be replaced by some superhero team thing. There's a stupid superhero (and I mean, like, incompetent and intellectually disabled and unlikely to be able to function independently in normal society, and I hate it when there's a character like that in a film just to give the scriptwriters and the antagonist/protagonist an easy ride) and a token black female character and Elastidog or whatever it's called. I don't recall ever seeing any of these characters originally so can't really comment on the source material.

Then there's Dick Dastardly who's been reinvented as a supervillain. The villain actually isn't bad and is one of the high points of the film, but he doesn't resemble the original motor racer with a pathological addiction to cheating either in appearance or in personality much. He looks more like the Red Max with severe curvature of the spine, and he's an evil genius/inventor who's built a small army of robot minions and a giant atmospherically unfriendly airship.

All these mixed-up characters mean that none of them really get sufficient screen time for them or the relationships between them to be developed. Shaggy is a coward who loves his dog and Velma is studious/pedantic/dogmatic. Dick is evil/noble/clever. The superhero is stupid. Everyone else is nothing apart from an occasional line.

Too bad. :-(

I loved Wacky Races as a child, and funnily enough I still love it as an adult and I don't think it's aged badly. It's one of those things that gets criticized for having stereotypes in it and too much violence, but many of the characters are a lot more nuanced than they look, and all the violence is karmic and mild and generally involves Dick Dastardly's schemes backfiring in a world where being run over is just a minor inconvenience and explosives simply make you dirty and mess up your clothing.

Penelope Pitstop is the character most frequently vilified as being sexist, but any of that is a really minor aspect of her and is overshadowed by her strengths. She's shown to be a competent driver who wins races on her own steam, doesn't get distracted or intimidated by the interests of most of the male characters, and is mechanically adept and mends her car at one point using her hairpin. She seems to have designed and built all those gadgets she uses to put on her make-up while she's driving, which takes serious brains and skill and puts her in the same league as Professor Pat Pending. She's ditzy and she loves pink and silly girly stuff, but there's nothing wrong with being a girly girl. On occasion she is the damsel in distress who calls for help and gets rescued, but it doesn't happen that often, and in fact, Dick Dastardly ends up in a mess and calling for help more often than she does (Muttley, DO something!).

And Dick Dastardly and Muttley, what can I say? Some people would dismiss Dick as being just a generic villain with a moustache, but he goes much deeper than that. He and Muttley have a real camaraderie, despite they way they treat each other. Dastardly is shown at one point begrudgingly tickling Muttley, and Muttley is faultlessly loyal to his master (to the point that in one race where he gets left behind following a successful act of sabotage on another competitor, he desperately runs after the Mean Machine and tries to climb back on board, damaging the car in the process). Dastardly, far from being a born loser, is a competent and reasonably intelligent character who drives the best car in the race, and of course the running joke is that he spends every episode putting his foot down to generate an enormous lead so that he can stop and lay excessively elaborate traps that go wrong for him, and ultimately loses for that reason. He's something akin to a tragic hero in this respect (or at least a tragicomic antivillain) and this is the reason why Wacky Races is rather more complicated than a lot of people give it credit for. It's hard not to feel sympathy for Dastardly and Muttley and hope that they might win just one race, but also easy to laugh at them when they lose again.

Peter Perfect might look like a stereotypical hero, and he never cheats, and is chivalrous and kindhearted and keen to help Penelope Pitstop (and Dick Dastardly as well and probably anyone else in a mess), but he's also a bit of a pansy and not that skilled a driver, and the running joke is that his 'Turbo Terrific' frequently falls to pieces, usually to his utterance of quaint euphemistic expletives such as 'Fiddlesticks!'

Rufus Ruffcut is a musclebound lumberjack with a pet beaver, but manages not to fall into the trap of being portrayed as all muscle and no brain. He's not above underhand tactics, but he is shown to have quite a strong sense of fair play and will intervene if he thinks someone is abusing an advantage.

Pat Pending is an inventor and sometimes helps out other competitors and foils Dastardly's schemes. He cheats almost as much as Dastardly himself, although his methods tend to be less dangerous, not that it seems to matter much considering the physics of explosives and their negligible effect on human anatomy in this particular cartoon.

The Ant Hill Mob are seven dwarf Noo Yoick gangsters in a 1920s car (oddly named presumably after the Lavender Hill Mob, a film about London crooks pulling off a heist). They frequently break away from the race by trying to escape the police, but help out people they find in trouble.

The Slag Brothers, the Gruesome Twosome, and the Army Surplus Special are more stereotyped and less developed, with the Slags being two cavemen overwhelmed with body hair in a car made out of rocks, and the gruesome being a small vampire creature and a Frankenstein's monster in a hearse with a dragon in the roof. The Army Surplus are two soldiers in a tank.

The last two who are also pretty undeveloped and probably haven't aged well are Red Max, a German WW1 pilot in a car that looks like a Fokker, and an elderly impoverished redneck called just 'Luke' driving a car cobbled together out of his kitchen furniture with a live bear on it.

With Disney apparently redoing all their old cartoons there seems to have been an interest in recent years in film companies attempting to resurrect Wacky Races or the characters in it. A 2020 Scooby Doo film cast Dick Dastardly as a super villain, the villain being pretty cool in himself but looking more like Red Max than Dastardly and dissimilar in character, missing the point that the character's pathological addiction to cheating was his downfall. An attempt in 2017 to remake the original disappointingly omitted most of the original characters and ruined the ones it did use by stereotyping them, changing Peter Perfect into a dumb, vain jock, Penelope Pitstop into an obnoxious Mary Sue by removing her likable character flaw of bumbling dizziness in the name of anti-girly-girl bowdlerisation, . Even more ironically and disappointingly it had even worse violence than the original, with not only cartoon explosives but more disturbing, nonsensical, and not at all amusing violence mainly inflicted on Dastardly not as a result of his own actions, such as a character in one episode incessantly punching him in the face and him being tied up and beaten with sticks by a mob in another. I would love to see the original recreated in modern higher-budgeted animation in a way that does justice to what the characters and idea originally were, but after what I've seen I'm not hopeful for it.

What's good about this? The Mean Machine and the Turbo Terrific are faithful to their original models, and it's really fun to see them animated in this style and driving around. The episodes that follow the original format in which there is a race and Dick Dastardly and Muttley cheat and end up losing because of it are often enjoyable, and sometimes they even win, although it tends to be a pyrrhic victory. The design of the original characters in most respects is OK and they're recognisable.

What's bad about it is that most of the characters from the original have been left out (in the case of the redneck driving a car made from his kitchen furniture and the German WW1 pilot in a Fokker, that might be understandable, but not for the others). New characters that don't match the style of the originals and are either irrelevant or annoying have been added, such as an irritating self-proclaimed 'genius' child/midget riding around in a flying robot nanny car that gets far too much air time, a man and woman who stand around talking at the start of the programme wasting time that could have been used to show Dastardly plotting something, and pirates in a novelty car that are drawn in such a simplistic and bland style they look to have been borrowed from a preschool cartoon. The main three characters of Dastardly/Muttley, Pitstop, and Perfect have been changed from what they originally represented and it's not an improvement, and the Gruesome Twosome (the only other team from the original to make it in) aren't that interesting and their vehicle doesn't resemble and has none of the charm of the original. The episodes that aren't about racing are frequently so bad as to be completely unwatchable.

Dick Dastardly in the original Wacky Races worked really well as a classy camp villain protagonist because the joke was that he was reasonably competent, drove a great car, and would probably have won had he not spent every episode generating a huge headstart and then squandering it by trying to cheat. Although he and Muttley did not treat each other well, they were shown as having a real camaraderie, and even though they were sympathetic and you wanted them to win, when Dick lost or humiliated himself, it was always because of his own actions. You didn't resent the other well-meaning competitors who also occasionally cheated but for the most part helped out each other and often the villains too. Penelope Pitstop was ditzy and in some ways a bit of a sexist stereotype, but she was shown to be competent as a driver and mechanically, and a strong autonomous character. Peter Perfect was a kindhearted and chivalrous competitor who never cheated, but he wasn't very competent and the running joke was that his car would fall to pieces.

Unfortunately in this series, Dastardly gets recast as either an antihero who is sort-of friends with the other racers or an Arnold Rimmer-type psychological trainwreck (the flanderised version from the later series and not the more three-dimensional Rimmer from the earlier and better-written series). Often bad stuff happens to him that isn't his fault, or he tries to do something good and bad stuff happens anyway, and the other characters don't care and ridicule or ignore him, or even deliberately cause the bad things happening to him. At best this comes across as him being an underdog excluded for his lack of competence or just who he is, and at worst it comes across as the other characters bullying him, and it actually makes his bad behaviour seem justifiable. Dick Dastardly in this incarnation is too sympathetic and you feel really sorry for him and end up disliking the other characters because of how they treat him. Pitstop and Perfect have been recast as an obnoxious Mary Sue heroine and a dim jock hero respectively and come across more as antagonists to Dastardly. Some of the design choices are questionable -- making Dastardly's costume purple instead of its original colours and replacing his functional white goggles enormous misshapen pink ones with sequins.

When Dastardly unintentionally causes an accident and begrudgingly helps the others while resolving it, they decide to 'work together as a team' while leaving him and Muttley behind to sort themselves out, and then at the end, Penelope Pitstop says something about teamwork being great and then in his earshot says something unkind about him having BO, which is a really terrible moral. In probably the worst episode (because I found it so disturbing I couldn't watch any more after this point) Dastardly is dressed as a clown and is hosting a children's television programme, and it's explained he's being forced to do this for no other reason than he is unpopular with the audience. He then gets strung up on a rope and beaten with sticks until he's visibly badly injured. This was vile and undeserved, and suggests whoever came up with it had some sort of disturbing perversion. It's particularly bad because a complaint frequently levelled at classic cartoons and given as the reason why they have to remake them is against violence that was generally karmic and benign, such as Dastardly being run over because he stood in the road and getting up unharmed with a tyre track on him, or putting a bomb in his pocket that explodes leaving him merely looking dazed and dirty with dishevelled clothing. This version is considerably more violent and in more inappropriate ways than the original, and it's a spiteful and nasty sort of violence that doesn't respect the meaning of the original.

The other thing that I really don't feel is appropriate for a programme for kids made in 2017 is that Dastardly or sometimes Perfect are frequently depicted wearing drag badly or ridiculous costumes in a demeaning way. The Two Ronnies was a long time ago and it just isn't funny or right to do this when a lot of young people, boys especially, feel under pressure to be macho and are insecure about being perceived as flamboyant. I don't think it would be a bad idea to reimagine Dick Dastardly as being a flamboyant Liberace-like antihero, or to have a modern drag artist in a cartoon, but if they're going to do that he needs to have allies who are more accepting and supportive of him. Or they need to just stick to the original idea of him being the sole cause of his own misfortune.

All this is a shame because there is potential that might have been better met if they'd just included a couple of characters like Rufus Ruffcut to be a macho hero and Prof. Pat Pending as a woman character to even out the ratio (benefits of a unisex name) that would have allowed the characters to have kept more of their nuance and fun, and stuck to the original ideas of the characters. Unfortunately this means it'll probably be another 50 years before anyone will think of making another Wacky Races that might do the original justice.