I made a critical omission yesterdoy: Speed Racer drives a car and he beats up thugs. Beating up thugs is important.

Why is Speed Racer an American movie? We wouldn’t let Japan make an Underdog movie. I wish we would have!

Who even liked speed racer? I remember in the middle-90s knowing it was on television but not wanting to watch it. It was just some dork who drove a car, after all. It never seemed special enough for me to pay attention to. I thought the theme song was kind of funny but that was all. It was never on in the same place, either. I seem to recall it being on Mtv at some point, when Mtv was still experimenting with just what to have on instead of music television but hadn’t quite latched on to that whole “horrible” concept. Searches for “mtv speed racer” are expectedly useless, as MTV is primarily a black-hole vortex void of commercialism sponsored by commercialism, selling i-pods so people can hear the songs in i-pod ads, so of course mentioning it in the same context as anything which was expected to be popular by people who stood to profit from it in the past 15 years will get nothing but useless speculation, contests, tie-ins, and redundant preview clips in odd places. Why the helicopter is there a “MTV Movies Blog?” Why is there a “MTV Multiplayer” video game site? What is “mtv?” The name is meaningless.
Who gives a nosegay what some ubiquitous logo thinks about a category of electronic distraction it has no connection with? The M,T & V are only there so you know you’re not at IGN or TMZ or OBGYN or IHOP. (and oh, do I ever)

I looked just now at what’s on MTV, lucky number 160, the tv channel, the rumored origin of its second and third letters, and the box just says “Next.” And so I look in the box beside that and it also says “Next.” It’s just telling me to not even bother.

Above that is “MTV2,” with an impressive collection of Beavis and But-thead, who I can deal with in controlled doses, and only mention at all because I do believe MTV2 was originally created with the promise that viewers could watch MTV without seeing Beavis or Butthead. But head what was I talking about before this? I need someone to keep me from getting off track.

Yes, that will have to do. Maybe it’s the fact that I never knew anyone liked Speed Racer that makes me less pessimistic than usual about this movie. I can’t tell who’s being pandered to here. I know the movie people like to make cartoons “realistic,” because… they hate cartoons?, but Speed Racer is just a nerd in an automobile who occasionally beats up thugs. How can they mess that up? As expected, there’s a lot of unnecessary, expensive special effects, but the movists used that to put the cars in space or something instead of just boring old race-places. American film-makers actually took a cartoon premise and made it MORE outlandish and LESS realistic (that is; assuming Fat Albert coming out of a television set or seejee Bullwinkle walking around St. Louis or Newark or wherever are realistic). This could easily have been some dumb Nascar cash-in movie celebrating the worst things on the planet but it isn’t. I don’t know what it is. And the less I know the less I can say about it! Now I still have time to go do something productive, like leave inappropriate comments on message-forum-things.

See you in cyberspace.