Rating: 
Summary: RELIVE YOUR SECOND CHILDHOOD
Review: Grab a bowl of Cheerios (R) and slip into your pajamas (with the stockings attached) and sit down & relive those thrilling days of Saturday Morning cartoons with Speed Racer. Contains 11 episodes, Some are 2 parters, there is 1 three part episode. There have been some MINOR changes though...they changed the opening titles....other than that, everything is the same as I remember it. Go get Speed Racer, GO!
Rating:
Summary: Speed kills.....
Review: I am so pleased to have Speed Racer back in my life, and especially in the life of my 3 year old son. I don't imagine there are many really young Speed fans anymore. How sad. We were even able to get him toy Mach 5 cars and he knows all the characters. This DVD is a great way to re-introduce yourself or your children to this great series. I wish and hope that more episodes will become available. The only downside is a sparse list of extras on the DVD. I hope that the company owning this franchise will see that there is still a demand for this great show and for related projects.
On a side note, Speed Racer items are available at the official Speed Racer web site. Ebay carries a number of Speed Racer items also, including the Japan-only Hot Wheels Mach 5.
The only hard part is, do I buy for my son to play with or for me to collect!
Rating:
Summary: blast from the past
Review: I can remember watching Speed Racer as a kid and was thrilled to see them rerelease the oldies. The new Speed Racer movies just aren't the same. My five year old son just loves each episode. The only drawback is that he wants to watch them all, all five hours worth. The Speed Racer episodes are full of excitement.
Rating:
Summary: A GREAT start on the entire Speed Racer collection!
Review: I can't tell you if every episode of Speed Racer will be released as a box set sometime in the future, but there is no reason to wait! This DVD is a GREAT start, and at a terrific price too. The first 11 episodes will do for now. (Hey - they could have given us just two or four episodes!)The picture quality looks great, very bright colors, and the audio is fine too. I didn't notice any soundtrack noise or picture scratches. There is a "play all episodes" features which allows you several uninterrupted hours of Speed, or you can just play individual episodes. I found the episode menu easy to use. It breaks down each complete episode on a separate page, two or three parts each, making it easy to select just the episode you want. On the negative side, there are no USEFUL chapter markings. I don't know that you really need them for a short episode, but the chapters that do exist are fairly nonsensical. Some episodes have several chapters while others have none. It appears the chapters actually correspond to the bonus material. For example, track 1, chapter 4 is the same as track 3, (yet it is track 3 which is used for the bonus material.) I can't understand why the main episodes (on track 1) need these chapter markings. Perhaps those who understand such technical things can explain! The bonus features are nice, but there is nothing that is particularly enlightening or new. You can see the Mach 5's control panel in action via clips from the episodes, but you're going to see that anyway when you watch the episode! I would like to have seen the 1996 Volkswagen commercial - it is mentioned but not included on the disc. Likewise, biographies but no photos of the voice cast. I guess you can check out the official 30th Anniversary Guide by Elizabeth Moran if you really want all the details. I give this DVD 5 stars for the episodes and fine quality. Buy it for the episodes, not the bonus materials.
Rating:
Summary: Best Speed Racer DVD Yet!!
Review: I highly recommend the Speed Racer episodes 1-11 to anyone who wishes to see what the 1966 classic looks and sounds like on DVD!. I have been a fan since I first saw Speed Racer premiere in March of 1967 on local TV. It's first-run ended in April of 1968 and then was re-ran through the late 70's. The Japanese company who made and copyrighted it in 1966 and it took them another year for it to be dubbed in English and distributed in US and Japan in 1967 and 1968. The original Trans-Lux credits; I could never forget seeing the 1966 on them when it first came on. I see someone made a misconception about the year it was assembled and later released in Japanese and US markets, no big deal. The US company that bought Speed Racer in 1993 had to replace the original Trans-Lux credits ( beginning and ending titles ), because the company was no longer in business that year and that is legalties for you. The ending animated credits are the same, except the computer credits are off the original video masters that Speed Racer Enterprises made off 35 negatives and later Cartoon Network bought the show and they time-compressed the show for commercial spots. Someone made a mistake with Jack Grime's last name Ha! I have them on VHS with the old white-lettered opening credits and and rarely play them, the DVD so much easier. Some of my friends work in the video and audio field and as soon as the DVD arrived, we all sat down for almost 5 hours and watched it on a giant 53 inch Hi-Def TV and progressive scan DVD player. Nothing was time-compressed on the DVD/video and the audio as well. A subtle, if perhaps faster intro with the opening title, which was replaced years ago when Trans-Lux in NY, who bought and marketed the show for TV in 1967, decades later went out of business in 1993, but it was barely noticable, if at all on the DVD the new titles. The video quality is pristine and what artifacts I did see were from the original 35 mm film itself. My DVD player did not freeze up at all. That also depends on the quality of your DVD player. Any artifacts, so minor you would not even spot them, especially on a giant screen TV! The clarity of DVD is so powerful! The colors are perfect and details are so easily seen, that I missed on TV and old VHS cheated us out of for years! This reproduction by Artisan surpasses the DVD set issued by Speed Racer Ent in 2001 here in the US. That set was done decently and with limited funds in 2001, and I compared both, and the SRE DVD box set ( which had visible artifacts and more edge noise to a much more higher degree ), is inferior to the new Speed Racer episodes 1-11 by Artisan. I am not complaining though. I enjoy them all! Now let's get episodes 12-52 on DVD's from Artisan by Christmas time when they give us the pre-ordering date! They said later this year, I hear Santa's bells ringing! As for the Japanese version, no one would be able to understand it unless they lived over there or we would all have to pay for a translater! Go, Speed, Go!!!!!!!!! :)
Rating:
Summary: Have a 4 and 6 year old at home?????
Review: I remember watching Speed Racer when it first came out. I was 4 years old. My two boys are now Speed Racer junkies. They have worn out this DVD. I even had to shell out 12 bucks for a Mach 5 Hotwheel.
It's great for kids. They don't make cartoons like this anymore.
Rating:
Summary: Just as I remembered it
Review: I watched everything on this first speed racer disc and was not dissapointed at all. The picture quality is quite good and clear, although I do think it would have been better to make a double sided dvd to fit all of these episodes. Truthfully people are just nitpicking this release at best because I can't see anything really wrong with it. I just hope to see the rest of the series become released and with some support I think we very well will.
Rating:
Summary: So good to have Speed back !!!!!!!!!
Review: I'm proud to say that I'm one of Speed Racer's FIRST generation American viewers. I distinctly remember seeing this fantastic series for the first time in late '67--when I was a mere 14 yr. old growing up in northern New Jersey--and it blew me away from the get go. There was nothing to compare it with--the beautiful animation and snappy dialogue was WORLDS APART from what the Hanna-Barbera people were doing at the time--of course, back then, I was way too unsophisticated to notice or care about such droll distinctions--all I knew was SPEED was COOL and Trixie was a BABE!! hehehe (never could "get" the whole Spridle,Chim-Chim thing, though.....but I guess that was part of SR's over-all charm, I suppose..a little strange incongruity doesnt hurt, does it?) As I view the series now--well into middle-age, a WONDERFUL NOSTALGIA overwhelms me--as I'm sure it does for all those who grew up with this quirky, yet seminal cartoon (I cringe at having to refer to SR as a "toon"--- because it means SO much MORE than that to me---but, alas... that's what it was, after all).... A truly BELOVED cartoon that will never be forgotten by so many of us over a certain age. I thank from the bottom of my heart all those brilliant Japanese artists and American voice actors who brought us this glorious work of art so many years ago. This dvd is a MUST for those that adore the show.
Rating:
Summary: Finally!
Review: I've loved Speed Racer since I was a little kid. When Ted Turner's first television station, WTBS, Channel 13, started up in Georgia in the mid-70s, he had all the great old shows, The Munsters, The Brady Bunch, Get Smart, The Addams Family, I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family....all part of his afternoon lineup. Speed Racer came on at 3 PM, Monday thru Friday. Every weekday for years I'd get out of school at 2:30, the bus would take me home, I'd rush into the house and turn on the TV just in time for the theme song. I never got tired of it. (Just an interesting point of trivia - I think - in a book on Speed Racer I read the results of a survey where Speed fans were asked what they considered the single most important reason Speed Racer is so popular. The #1 answer: the theme song.) I've seen some TV shows I loved as a kid, years later when they were released on video, and wondered how I ever could have enjoyed them. Being three years old is no excuse. The prime example being 8th Man. But I watch Speed Racer today, and while I'm well aware that, because of my history with the show, the fact it was such an important of my life while growing up, I love it perhaps more than can really be justified by what's there....some episodes still DO it for me. And that's pretty cool. What in America we call Speed Racer actually began in the Sixties in Japan as a manga (comic book) called Maha Go Go Go. In America you'll usually see this partially translated as Mach Go Go Go so that's the terminology I'll use from here on. Grand prix auto racing was very popular in Japan at the time, almost a national obsession. To Tatsuo Yoshida, the creator/artist/writer of Mach Go Go Go, the opportunity presented by this situation was obvious: create a series about a teenage Grand Prix driver. I have reprints of several of the original manga. At least some of the anime episodes (more about which shortly) were adaptations of previously published manga stories. The ....Go Go Go part of the title was a triple entendre. (1) "Go" means the number five in Japanese, it was a reference to the car's name, the Mach 5. (2) In the original manga and anime, the main character we call Speed Racer in the US was named Go Mifune (or Goh Mifune, I've seen it spelled both ways), a homage to Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune (Yoshida was a huge fan) which explains why "Speed" has a yellow G on his shirt and his support crew is called the Go Team. (3) The American word "Go," i.e. "Haul it, dude." The big red M on the Mach 5's hood, which in America we commonly assumed stood for "Mach 5" was actually the emblem of Mifune Motors, Pops Racer's car company. Likewise this explains the M on Speed's helmet. Trixie had an M on her blouse because in the original manga/anime her name was Michi Shimura. Sparky lucked out; the S on his chest happened to match both his Japanese name, Sabu, and American renaming, as well. One thing that never made any sense to me, when watching Speed Racer as a kid, was that Racer X had the "Mach 5 symbol" on his chest. It makes even less sense once you learn this is the Mifune Motors emblem. "Hello Speed, I'm secretly Kenichi Mifune, your older brother who ran away from home years ago. In order to hide this fact, I will....wear the emblem of the family business in foot high lettering on my chest!" Good plan. They'll never figure that one out. And of course, they didn't. In the original manga - and this is something we never really got from the anime - Michi (Trixie) was the spoiled, willful, rich daughter of the head of a rival car company (which explains how she owns her own helicopter - something I always wondered about as a kid - and drives a Mercedes). She first met the Racers when she was sent to spy on them. Wouldn't she know it, she fell in love with Speed which kind of scotched that plan. In my early teens I couldn't understand what Speed saw in Trixie. It's only with adult sensibilities that I appreciate what a total little hottie Trixie really was. Of course I hated the bratty kid brother. And the monkey! Don't get me started. WAY too much unneeded so-called comic relief in what should have been - and was - a really exciting, dramatic adventure series. I took my Speed Racer seriously. I could never understand how a guy as cool as Speed could have such a whiny little snot-nosed punk of a brother. All 52 episodes of the original Mach Go Go Go anime were translated into English and in 1967 began airing in America as Speed Racer. The series is about equally split between stand alone eps and two-parters (there's only one three-part Speed Racer). The series has a very self-contained air, with a beginning, middle and an end. It begins with Speed's first professional race and ends when he wins the world championship. In the late 80s thru early 90s the entire series was released on video tape. I bought about half the series, all the tapes I could find, at that time. Just a few months ago the first 11 episodes were released on DVD. You better believe I bought that one. (Hopefully we'll eventually see all 52 episodes on DVD.) All the video tapes that were dupes of DVD eps I then turned around and gave to my next door neighbor's teenage son. Spreading the glory and majesty that is Speed Racer to a new generation. And he really liked them. Obviously there's hope for America's future, after all.
Rating: 
Summary: FINALLY!! YES!!!
Review: If you love the original Speed Racer, there is no reason you shouln't buy this DVD. Let me tell you why you should. I always remember as a child, that the color wasn't that good. Guess what? They got it right and for all of us that are first or second generation Speed fans, your jaw will drop on how crystal clear and bright the color is. That literally blew me away.Now I agree with some reviewers that the special features are God awful. But I'm not as much a special feature person as some are. And they did stretch a little too much on one DVD. I don't know if it's just my disc but I found a point or two with some digital clicking. This is not a reason not to buy this though. The color and sharpness will amaze you. I'm not sure if this is just a trial run to put out a whole box set or what but for how much is on one disc, it's well worth it. I know this just says Collector's edition and not Volume one so I'm thinking they'll put out a complete box set.
|
