Mach Go Go Go

Here he comes. Here comes Speed Racer.

MTV these days is a bastion of pop-culture and reality trash, nothing at all worth watching like it was. You see, it used to show these things called "music videos" all the time. And late at night, it showed classics like Monty Python's Flying Circus and - my personal MTV favorite - Speed Racer.

For alot of us Anime geeks, Speed was our first exposure to the genre, along with Robotech, Voltron, as well as (to an older extent) Astro Boy and Gigantor. Speed, though, took the cake easy. What made him top out giant robots and killer transforming space fighters? The Mach 5. Forget the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT from Knight Rider) and any of those fancy James Bond rides. The Mach 5 was the original pimped out ride.

The Wachowski Brothers have said that they want to be true to the series without just bringing an episode to life in long form, and even though the second and third Matrix movies were a bit of a letdown, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt with Speed. Anime is a huge influence on animators and flimmakers these days, and the Wachowski's are no exception. After all, just look at the effects they pioneered with The Matrix. Not to mention the storyline was nearly straight out of Akira...

2008 should be, at the very least, a good year for geeks who love movies...