Wacky Races

Before I start, it occurs to me that, today being Election Day here in the US, you might get the impression that "Wacky Races" is some kind of pun. Like I'm writing about the election and have decided to use the name of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from 1968 to lead into the discussion. And normally, you might be right. But as it happens, I really am talking about the cartoon today.

See, I buy a lot of DVDs. And recently, when I came back to work after a lunch hour spent at Fry's Electronics, I discovered that I had, in my consumerist frenzy, purchased the complete series of Wacky Races, which I remembered vaguely as being not too horrible. Although I may have been thinking of Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines or even Laff-a-lympics. Point is, I watched the whole thing, and now I have some comments about it.

I realize that not everyone will be able to relate to this stuff, because you might not remember the show. Or you might not even have ever watched it to begin with. All I can say in that case is that I'm not making any of this up.

Dick Dastardly, of course, never wins. And I don't think that's fair, because he's obviously the best racer. After all, most of his diabolical tricks (all of which he stole from Wile E. Coyote) require him to be way out in front so he can put up fake detour signs or railroad crossings or whatever. By the end of the series, Dastardly often is in the lead all the way up to the final couple of feet, at which time something arbitrary happens to make him lose.

It certainly doesn't seem fair that the narrator keeps harping on how big a cheater Dastardly and Muttley are. For one thing, there are other teams that would seem to be theoretically evil: there's the Ant Hill Mob (organized crime), the Gruesome Twosome (evil monsters) and the Rufus Ruffcut and Sawtooth, the lumberjack team (they may not seem evil to everybody, but there are a lot of tree-huggers where I live, and they frequently use caricatures of lumberjacks that look suspiciously like Ruffcut). Plus, almost everybody in the race cheats all the time! The army team shoots cannons at the opposition, the cavemen bust stuff up with clubs, the professor encases other cars in bubble gum, etc. And yet, when a non-Dastardly team wins (through sheer chance; they almost never do anything other than look on passively as Dastardly's schemes backfire), it's hailed as a victory over evil. It doesn't seem right.

Another thing that doesn't seem right is how so many characters have driving goggles but don't ever wear them. They've all got them shoved up on their foreheads, over the brim of their jsunty driving hats. I guess that's what happens when you spend a lot of time designing characters (hey! The DVD has commentary by, among others, Iwao Takamoto and Jerry Eisenberg, the production designers! It's pretty interesting) and then don't really animate them that much.

I think that's probably what makes the show feel weird: Hanna-Barbera animation of the period was pretty crude, because they were trying to save money. There's nothing wrong with that; they just wanted to save money so they could make cartoons for television, and without that plan, there might never have been that terrible Pac-Man Family cartoon. But the whole concept of Wacky Races is kinetic, with lots of movement. So it doesn't really work on that level. Plus, it's not really all that wacky.

I admit that the narrator does say "wacky" and "daffy" a lot, but it's rarely justified by the antics on the track. And really, since the racers are all allegedly trying to become "The wackiest racer", Dastardly should win in a walk. If it weren't for him, there'd be hardly any wackiness at all; he's the one who's who's always tricking the other racers into driving around on an unfinished skyscraper's girders or playing in a little league baseball game in the middle of the race.

The worst character on the show, and possibly the worst character on any cartoon anywhere ever, is Blubber Bear. He's the copilot (or whatever) of the hillbilly team, riding with Luke on the Arkansas Chug-a-Bug. Blubber Bear's gimmick, I think, was that he was a coward, and therefore always crying. Except he was so uninteresting, there are only five or six times (ouf of all 34 races!) where that comes up. Most of the time, he's just smiling away as he sits behind Luke. After a few races, it's clear which racers are working and which aren't; the caveman team also fades way into the background. And that's good, because that team was really insulting to cavemen; they're less competent than Dick Dastardly.

I can understand how Dastardly and Muttley got a spinoff; they're obviously the most fun. But I'm still not sure why Penelope Pitstop rated her own show. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, but she's almost as bland as Peter Perfect. It's a good thing the Ant Hill Mob went along with her, though.

Okay, I think that's it . . . oh! One more thing: I prefer it when the other races overcome Dastardly's plots on their own, as opposed to the plan just backfiring on its own. Pat Pending (the wacky scientist) is the only one that does that, though. In fact, Pat Pending is almost the only one aside from Dastardly who has any initiative of his own: he reacts to the environment when everyone else just sits there and gets crushed by flying boulders. And when you look at the character models, the professor does look a bit like Dick Dastardly: they've both got the big nose and pointy chin. Even their voices are similar.

So my theory is that Prof. Pat Pending and Dick Dastardly are secretly brothers.

All right, that's all I have.