Another Pass at Speed Racer

We’re joined by Sophia Ricciardi, host of Movie Struck and The Overly Sarcastic Podcast, to look at the 2008 Wachowski flop. By the end of the episode will we be saying

“Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer, Go!”?

You can hire Sophia to edit for you here!

You can support Sophia on the Movie Struck patreon here!

SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts • Google Podcasts • Spotify • iHeartRADIO • Stitcher • RSS

AI meeting summary:

●      The transcript begins with a discussion about the movie "Speed Racer" and how some people have no interest in car-related movies. They also mention their lack of knowledge about cars and their indifference towards them. The conversation then transitions into an introduction of the podcast hosts and guest for that episode, discussing other shows they are involved in. They talk briefly about their love for movies and specifically "Speed Racer." They mention how it is a flawed but fascinating movie that they want to discuss further. The hosts express their excitement for reaching their 150th episode milestone and introduce Sophia Ricciardi as their guest. Sophia talks about her podcast, Moviestruck, where she invites guests to pick any movie to watch and discuss. She mentions having Sam Alicea and Case Aiken on her show previously to talk about the Muppets. Sophia also shares her love for "Speed Racer" as a fan of the movie.

●      The conversation shifts back to discussing "Speed Racer," with Case mentioning its flop status at the box office despite having a significant budget return ratio compared to his own projects. He humorously jokes about being a centaur if he had such returns on his work.

●      They continue talking about when they first saw "Speed Racer" - Sophia saw it in theaters due to her father's enthusiasm for both the original cartoon series and this adaptation, while Sam did not see it initially but enjoyed it upon watching later.

●      They reflect on what drew them to watching "Speed Racer", sharing positive aspects like commitment to its style, production design, cinematography, commentary on capitalism, fun elements from cartoons/anime adaptations (e.g., ghost racers), etc.

●      Sam expresses some reservations regarding certain parts feeling too long or tonally inconsistent between serious themes/drama versus child-like antics. They discuss whether it could have been rated differently (PG-13 or G) depending on adjustments made throughout.

●      Case mentions scenes that he felt were unnecessary or could have been cut down to improve pacing, while still acknowledging some good character development for Pop Racer. They also discuss the difficulty of adapting child sidekicks like Spritle and Chim-Chim from the original cartoon, with mixed opinions on their presence in the movie.

●      The conversation concludes with remarks about how "Speed Racer" balances its adaptation elements and manages to be engaging despite a long runtime.

●      The transcript discussion revolves around the production design, costumes, and style choices in the movie "Speed Racer." The speakers appreciate how the film combines older aesthetics with modern sensibilities. They mention specific details such as Emile Hirsch's costume, racetrack settings, and various characters like Snake Oiler and the viking team. There is also a conversation about missed opportunities in showcasing more racers earlier in the movie. Overall, they agree that while some scenes could be trimmed down for a tighter edit, the colorful and unique visual style of "Speed Racer" should have been better marketed to its intended audience to maximize its appeal.

Action items:

●      Tangible action items from the transcript grouped by responsible person:

Speed Racer:

●      Race with integrity and not let his brother's lead time be crushed (00:05)

●      Turn down Royalton's offer to join his team (45:28)

●      Spritle and Chim-Chim:

●      Uncover the spear hook at Royalton's factory (47:34)

Royalton:

●      Persuade Speed Racer to join his team (45:33)

●      Tangible action items from the transcript:

●      Trim down some of the dialogue and soapbox rants to tighten up the movie.

●      Cut back on some of the races, particularly in the middle, to make it more focused.

●      Add quicksand to one of the races for added excitement and humor.

●      Improve scale visuals and make sure they align with the setting.

●      Tighten up scenes that are overly long or unnecessary, such as certain comedic moments with Chim-Chim.

●      Focus on marketing strategy to better target appropriate audiences and clarify what kind of movie Speed Racer is (not just a kids' film).

●      Consider pushing for a PG-13 rating instead of PG, as it would allow for a slightly more mature tone without losing its family-friendly appeal.

●      Edit down certain speeches and monologues that feel preachy or long-winded. Keep important plot points but streamline them for better pacing.

●      These actions aim to improve pacing, focus on key elements, clarify audience targeting, and ensure a consistent tone throughout.

Outline:

●      I. Introduction

●         A. Host introduction and episode milestone (01:13)

●         B. General discussion about the episode (01:22)

●         

●      II. Opening Sequence and Announcers

●         A. Appreciation for the opening sequence (10:39)

●         B. Multilingual announcers and understanding the story (11:52)

●         

●      III. Runtime and Editing

●         A. Length of the movie and the need for editing (12:32)

●         B. Suggestions for tightening the film (1:23:12)

●         

●      IV. Dialogue and Exposition

●         A. Criticism of certain dialogue (37:20)

●         B. Trimming down dialogue to focus on races (1:27:44)

●         

●      V. Time Setting and Narration

●         A. Lack of a specified time setting (21:33)

●         B. Opening narration and its impact (22:42)

●         

●      VI. Editing Challenges and Notes

●         A. Difficulty of editing due to complex scenes (1:52:26)

●         B. The importance of an editor (1:59:04)

●         

●      VII. Conclusion

●         A. Final thoughts and gratitude for bringing up the movie (2:00:31)

●         B. Recommendations for listening to other shows (2:04:03)

Notes:

●      Speeches need to be tightened up.

●      Cut down on soapbox rants and trim dialogue to focus on the races.

●      Recurring characters should be established early on.

●      Open with the flashback scene and trim down unnecessary scenes.

●      Use tricks and call-backs to make the film more cohesive.

●      Editing should be done to avoid repetition and keep the audience engaged.

●      Prepare snacks and take breaks while editing.

●      Add more at the end of the podcast episode.

●      Enjoy a party without the trauma of speaking out loud.

Transcript

(Subject to Error)

00:00
Sam
Oh, you specifizing. The make and model of this means nothing to me, because they all look the same. They have hoods, they have wheels, and they go, broom. That's it. So for me, just like with the Fast and the Furious movies, I have no interest. Like, anytime there's a car on the screen, like, my brain's like, what else is happening? Why are things moving? I don't care. So that might have made this movie longer for me.

00:24
Case
Well, were you constantly confused about what this circle that was like in front of them that they were gripping onto very tightly? Constantly?

00:31
Sam
No. I know enough to know what a steering wheel is. I know that much.

00:36
Sophia
And you know that all cars also have a series of buttons on the steering wheel that produce different effects depending on which one you push, right? Like homing pigeons.

00:43
Case
This is true, but on most commercial models, it's like radio.

00:48
Sophia
Your car doesn't have, like, jumper. Jack jumpers.

00:51
Case
Oh, God, I wish so much. Welcome to certain POVs, another Pass podcast with Case and Sam, where we take another look at movies that we find fascinating but flawed. Let's see how we could have fixed them. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Another Pass podcast. I'm Case Aiken. And as always, I'm joined by my host, Sam Alicea.

01:16
Sam
Hi.

01:17
Case
And we are revving up as we have cleared our 150th episode. We are recording this well before that episode has dropped, so this feels like just like General Space, but today, we are joined by the wonderful Sophia Ricciardi.

01:31
Sophia
Hello.

01:32
Sam
Hello.

01:32
Sophia
Thank you.

01:32
Case
Did I get that right?

01:34
Sophia
You nailed it.

01:35
Case
You got it in one pre roll. I was, like, so stressed about he.

01:40
Sam
Said the name, like, ten times.

01:41
Case
This is true.

01:42
Sam
Just practice.

01:43
Sophia
As far as the audience knows, you got it perfectly without even having to ask.

01:48
Case
So, Sophia, were on your show, Moviestruck a little while ago, although by the time this drops will have been a long while ago. But who are you? Tell people. Quick plugs.

01:58
Sophia
Yeah. Hello. I am Sophia Ricciardi. I do a lot of podcasts. Basically, my flagship show is Moviestruck. It's a podcast about movies and the people who watch them. Every episode, I bring on a different guest and ask them to pick any movie they want for us to watch and discuss. It's a great time. Sam and Case came on and talked about the muppets. It was a blast. You should go back and listen to that episode if you want to hear more from them, because it was so much fun. I produced a couple other shows here and there. I work with Overly Sarcastic Productions a lot. I'm on the D D podcast, rolling with difficulty. Sometimes I tweet about movies on Twitter, but if that's still around by the.

02:28
Sam
Time this episode comes, big questions.

02:32
Sophia
Yeah, but main show is Moviestruck, and you can find me in everything I do.

02:38
Sam
There.

02:38
Sophia
And I love movies. And more importantly, I love Speed Racer.

02:41
Case
Yeah, I was about to ask, so why are we watching Speed Racer?

02:46
Sophia
We are watching Speed Racer because I have a reputation on the internet for being a massive fan of this movie and it felt appropriate to continue singing its praises on this podcast where we will hopefully be fixing it. I think that it is the perfect crystallization of the idea of commitment to the bit. It's both an incredibly good adaptation of a cartoon that is admittedly very old and cheesy and itself manages to hold on to a lot of that fun element while being a beautiful, if polarizing movie. I really like the production design and cinematography, but I recognize that it is not for everyone and I'm sure we have much to discuss in that regard.

03:26
Case
Yeah, I hadn't seen this movie before. It was on our list of like because it's a flop. It had $120,000,000 budget and it had a $94 billion return, which if anything I ever did had a $94 million return. I'd be like, oh, that's great. But if I burned $26 million in the process, probably some legs would be broken of mine. Both of them. I can't reveal to the audience that I'm a centaur.

03:54
Sophia
Yeah. And this movie came out when I was prime, see all of the trailers for it.

04:01
Case
I was going to ask because I'm getting up there in my years. And so I was curious. This movie is the type of movie that I think would resonate for people who saw it young, and I'm about to be very pained to find out the answer. How old were you when you saw this movie and did you see it in theaters?

04:21
Sophia
Oh, great question. Let me just do some quick math to figure out how old I was because this came out in 2008. I'm about early 20s, so would have been like maybe twelve when this came out. I did see it in theaters. I will say a big part of why I in particular was tuned into this movie coming out is because my dad, who has been on moviestruck to talk about this movie, is a massive Speed Racer fan. He watched the original cartoon or the anime, really, when he was growing up. And we would watch those when I was a really little kid. So when this movie was coming out, he's like, Sophia, we got to see it. I'm so excited for this. And his excitement carried on to young Sophia as well. And we both really loved this movie.

05:02
Sophia
But yes, I saw this in theaters when it came out and almost more than the movie itself. The thing I remember about it is the marketing campaign that went with it because it had juicy drop pop and like baby bottle pop tie ins. There was a little, like, flash game that you could play. If everyone remembers flash games, that was just like you a racing game with all the cars from the show, but you had to little code in from all those lollipops and things that you could buy. And then there is one shot in the movie where they open a big drawer of candy and there's product placement right there. I don't know if I love this marketing campaign because I think something that could have been improved with this movie would be to have it be PG 13 instead of PG.

05:44
Sophia
I think it's marketed to the wrong audience. Yeah.

05:48
Case
So minor spoiler for my pitch. I was going to go the other way.

05:52
Sophia
Really?

05:53
Case
Yeah. I was saying, like, I think this could have been a G movie and that would have just opened up a larger audience.

05:59
Sophia
Interesting.

06:00
Case
OOH, this will be an interesting conversation. Okay, so you're thinking this could have been a PG 13 movie because admittedly, there's some swearing in it, which I think is one of the big reasons why it ended up not being fully G rated on this all. And then there's like, cartoonish violence because everything in this movie is cartoonish as h***.

06:19
Sophia
There's a moment where a man flips a car, punches a different driver in the face, lands the car and then smirks. And if you're not on board when you're watching that, I got nothing for it.

06:27
Sam
I mean, honestly, for me, it was the beehive drop into was. That was awesome. That was great. Full looney tunes there.

06:36
Case
Yeah. Sam, had you seen this movie before? And either way, had you had an association with Speed Racer before the movie came out?

06:44
Sam
So yeah, I did have an association with Speed Racer before the movie came out because I used to watch the old reruns. I'm not quite old enough to have watched it when it originally aired, but I did watch old reruns when I am much older than Sophia, but not quite old enough. And so I did watch the reruns. It was something that was funny. There were actual times where Hannah Babera actually worked Speed Racer into some of their shows. Like, there was like crossover events and I watched all of those old cartoons. I really like weird, quirky things. So Speed Racer write up because it's very cheesy. It's very, like, fun, action packed. I did not see this movie was not sold on the trailer was. I remember seeing it and being like, yeah, you know what? I'm probably good.

07:38
Sophia
I'm probably good.

07:40
Sam
And so when this came up, I was just like, oh, no, am I going to hate this? Is this going to be okay? And then I watched it and I was like, actually, it's really not that bad. It's kind of fun. It's got really fun moments. I feel like it's one of those movies that you finish it and it had really fun moments and you're not quite sure where it went wrong. Like, I was sitting there after the film and I was like, was it like the tone? Because I feel like they committed. They committed to the cheese. They committed to the beat. They committed to the drama because there's so much drama, which is always encased in anime. Definitely. Really, like, all of these terrible things are happening about racing and Racer X, which I always loved in the cartoon.

08:27
Sam
And I was just like, really, honestly, just the whole through line there, I was down with. And I knew what the twist was, but I was just like, yeah, they're not going to know. But at the end of the film, I still felt like it was too long. And I felt like there was like, despite being committed to the bit, there still felt like a tone issue. There were things that they wanted to do. And I think that's why both of you are like, it should have gone lighter or heavier because there were moments that leaned into both. And I feel like the film didn't know if it wanted to be, like, super serious commentary on greed and corruption versus a child and a monkey f****** everything up. Like, I don't know if they knew what they really want. I'm sorry.

09:16
Sam
It was a chimp. Apologies.

09:19
Case
Yes. As we established, as we did our five part retrospective on the Planet of the Apes movies recently, monkey is an offensive term to chimpanzee.

09:27
Sam
Don't want to do that. And I, for one, welcome our ape overlords. So I'm not trying to offend them up ahead at all. But yeah, no, look, I think the thing is, at the end of the movie, I had a smile and I really liked the cootie warning. I thought that was great. Totally keeping that no matter what, in my pitch. I thought it was wonderful. And, yeah, that's how I felt about this film. And thank you, Sophia, for I mean, it was a little long. It was a little long. It cut into World Cup time this morning. Not happy about that, but I enjoyed myself.

10:09
Sophia
You didn't get the same energy from the first race series of announcers from around the world giving you the same spirit as the World Cup.

10:17
Sam
In that opening sequence, they were very good, but they're not as good as the coverage on Telemundo. And I just want to say that if you are watching soccer on Fox or any English speaking network, you are missing out. Please only watch it in Spanish. Learn Spanish just for that because that is top tier announcing as was in this movie. I mean, these Spanish announcers were wonderful.

10:38
Sophia
Yeah, I love the opening sequence where they're telling the tragic story of Rex Racer and they use the different announcers from different languages. And even if you don't speak every language, you kind of understand what's being said is all you get the yeah. Yeah.

10:51
Case
God, if every sporting event had green screened announcers just like being superimposed over the action just being, like, panning across and another person goes back and forth. I would love sports way more than I do because I'm not sports.

11:06
Sam
You're not sports. I have to say, though, what I really loved about that, and I'm just going to jump into things that I loved about this movie, is that it was great to get that exposition in that way because it was still fun and it was still exciting. And you're watching this race and you're doing these cutbacks, but they weren't distract for me. They weren't distracting from the actual through line of what was happening. So I actually thought that was really well done because you have the announcers and it's from all over the world. So this gives you the scope of how big this league is, number one. And then they're telling the story of Rex, who we've kind of met, like, in this first part with young speed. And so we're getting this vision. And in between they're telling stories.

11:56
Sam
And then each of his family members are getting to have a moment to kind of introduce part of that story in depth. And I thought, like, oh, this is really well done because this is actually all exposition, but it's still moving really well. And it's actually, like, really great pacing and it's fun and exciting. And also, I don't have to look at cars too much, so I am really enjoying this.

12:19
Sophia
Yeah, this movie does a fantastic job of using characters or objects wiping across the screen to keep the movement of the race even when they're not on the cars. Something I think it just does. Like, admittedly, some of the races are a little long. This movie is an over two hour runtime, and you can always cut these things down. I'm very pro that sweet 90 minutes. But all of the races, you kind of keep the concept of space and movement without having to just have one big overhead shot of the track, seeing all the cars and where they're laid out through the different wipes that they're using. And I think that they nail that throughout the film. But you get to, like you dive right into it. They waste no time.

12:55
Sophia
I'm getting you right into here's how this film is going to look the whole time. If you think it's going to chill out, it is not. He's got to go.

13:06
Sam
If they stopped, that'd be wrong. It would be wrong. It would be without the spirit. It does keep the spirit, at the very least.

13:14
Case
Yeah. No one can say that this movie isn't experimental in terms of how that they're trying to present everything we talked about, how it's at the same time, very for kids style cartoony and at the same time, how can we have commentary on capitalism. And I found that very prescient.

13:33
Sophia
It is a wachowski movie has to work its way in there somewhere.

13:37
Case
That's exactly what I was getting to this is definitely a wachowski movie. The Wachowskis in general, I feel, are getting sort of a second look in pop culture these days. Like, people are looking back and looking at all the things they've done and seeing interesting themes that were in earlier works and appreciating a lot of the movies that they have done since that kind of were panned. And this movie is sort of like the big start of their having some issues in their careers. But like we talked about Jupiter ascending. And as dumb as that movie is, I really like it. It's a movie that I have a lot of fun with. And Cloud Atlas is a movie that I love way more than it probably deserves, but I still love it so g****** much.

14:20
Case
And someday we'll figure out how to release the lost episode on that one because that's a lot to talk about in that movie. But the Wachowskis have, like, really interesting stuff going on as their own baggage going into this movie. And then you've got the Speed Racer franchise, which I grew up watching. The Speed Racer X, the 90s series that dropped. That was my first introduction to it. I saw some of the original series, but I haven't really watched that much of it. By the was dated.

14:53
Sophia
My 50 something year old father watched it when he was a child.

14:58
Case
Right.

14:59
Sophia
It's been around for a minute and it was not new for him.

15:03
Case
Right. So I was familiar with an updated version, which I'm not going to get into what's the most pure version of this cartoon because obviously the one that has the cultural impact is the 60s version. And everything since then has just been like, playing with it all. But it was a franchise I was familiar with as a kid. I knew the racer x stuff. I knew that franchise as a whole. And then this movie unlocked a deep memory for me in terms of just, like, remembering Speed Racer stuff. Because there was an arcade game for Speed Racer that was I only ever saw at one place in the wild but it was a place that I saw a lot, which was at the Grotto Pizza in Bethany Beach, Delaware. There was the speed Racer arcade game.

15:45
Case
And just every summer, I would at some point play that game. And it was like one of the arcade racing games where you have the full seating area kind of set up and your handle actually has the buttons to press. So all very cool stuff. But it was like, oh, my God, that unlocked that memory for me. And as I was watching this movie, I was like, all right, so an additional challenge they have. Sam, I'm glad you brought up like, Mario Kart. Like, this movie feels like a video game and could very easily have just been a video game.

16:15
Sam
It definitely could. And I love the Mario Kartness of this movie. I love the visual effects because they've got the Speed ramps and the course feels insane. This feels like a league that is like no other racing league you've ever seen, which makes it feel modern. And, I mean, honestly, even the track reminds me of the last stage, rainbow stage in Mario Kart, right in the first scene. So it is fun, and especially for someone like me. I'm not a car person. I don't like cars. I generally don't even like movies with car chases in them. A car chase, to me, needs to be like there needs to be like an ends to the means, right? Like, you need to do it because it's going to get you somewhere else, but it needs to end. It can't go on for minutes upon minutes.

17:07
Sam
Five minutes top, guys. Five minutes top. That's all I want to see of cars. Which is why I don't like the Fast and the Furious movies. I don't care. I've said it come at case. I'm not anywhere you can find me. I'm so brave. But the thing is that this film is incredibly good at using those effects and kind of giving you those crazy lines. And in that first scene, it is kind of great because it establishes so much in that first race, I should say, because not the first scene, but the first race is so good because it establishes so much. It gives you first the exposition of everything that has happened and what happened to Speed's brother. And then it gives you the phantom of his brother right in front of him. He's like, do you know who you're racing against?

17:59
Sam
And he's like, I do. And I kind of really love that because it's like there's no one else on that course that can touch him. And he's just racing a ghost, right?

18:09
Case
Yeah. I love that they did the video game, like Ghost Racer trope, like the time trials mario kart or whatever. I loved that thing. I loved how that scene played out as a whole. It was like just really leaning in what this movie is.

18:25
Sam
And then it shows you how much he loves his brother because we know as the audience that he could have kept his foot on the accelerator and he could have beaten his brother's time. But he despite his brother being defamed and having some people say really horrible things about him and all the things that happened, he still respects and loves his brother and loves the fact that his brother's lead time is still up there. And he doesn't want to crush it. He just wants to behind it. And that sets up so much about Speed's character and his relationships in this movie that it's actually really wonderful. So kudos for that first part of the movie.

19:02
Case
Yeah, that scene, I think, does a lot of really good work. My big takeaway on this movie, though, is that I think that everyone gets thrown in really into the deep end right off the bat. And I think that scene, on the one hand, it's great that we're going to be like, okay, so all the weirdness of the setting that's just going to be part of this movie, every shot is going to be real f****** weird. Like, you think you're in the suburbs and that they would just shoot like normal grass.

19:29
Sophia
No, it's the most highly saturated, greenest grass you've ever seen in your life. And it will stay that way the whole time.

19:38
Sam
I think it's because somehow they're, like, channeling the 60s, but they also want it to feel timeless. And that's one of the things that throws you off, and not just about this movie, but the whole entire film. I remember at one point looking at someone's clothing and being like, where are we in time? The setting and the house and the family dynamics. And some of the things that some of the people are wearing feels like.

20:05
Case
The some of the dates, too, because they talk about the 42 Grand Prix.

20:10
Sam
Right.

20:11
Case
And I wanted to go back and I didn't have time to confirm that it was like the 1942. But I think it's supposed to be that. And certainly the images look like it. So we're in some sort of abstract future past.

20:25
Sophia
Yeah, it's a little like retro futuristic, but it's not quite other than the fact that there was a crazy giant city with blimps and all sorts of hyper advanced racing related technology, there's nothing objectively confirming like, this is the future or this is the past.

20:40
Sam
Right. So it's really weird. So your body kind of like there are things around you that makes you think, oh, this is like the 1960s and the 1940s. Maybe because of the way they're dressing, the way they talk, especially the family unit. Right? Like their house reminds you of a house that would be in a 60s sitcom, that kind of thing. But then you go down to the world and even Richmond, he shows up and he's got something that looks like the most amazing cell phone. I mean, it's tiny, but it's able to decipher things. It looked like several languages could be typed into that thing. And it's just like a little memo pad for him, like I'm going to do. And the car technology is definitely even more advanced than what we have right now. Honestly.

21:26
Sam
Honestly, there is no time in this actual movie. There's no time setting for this actual movie. And that can be disorienting for people.

21:39
Case
Yeah, there's so much with the setting. But the other thing about that opening race being what it is in terms of being the deep end is that it also is a lot of exposition right off the bat. And I feel like for people coming into this movie, they are either on board or they're not. And that's where the split occurs. You're not eased into this world, you are immediately experiencing all of it. You're not ready for the Racer X drama going on like, oh, the long lost older brother who he looks up to. If you're not already prepared for all of this stuff about the characters then I don't think the movie ever does anything to hook you again later on.

22:23
Case
For fans of the franchise, it all makes sense because everyone knows all the details about the main story thing that everyone remembers about Speed Racer. As a thing. It's like, oh, yeah, there's Racer X. He's so cool. He's also Speed's brother.

22:37
Sophia
Racer X unbeknownst to speed is his long lost brother, Rex Racer.

22:41
Case
Right.

22:41
Sophia
The opening the narration that occurred in every episode of the show.

22:45
Sam
Right, exactly.

22:48
Case
Also, can we just pause for a moment? And all the names are so on the nose. But Racer X is Racer X. Race is Rex Racer. Rex. He's not even not having his name. He's just, like, reversed the order.

23:04
Sophia
A lot of the names are you can tell they come from a very old anime in a lot like Pops Racer, Speed Racer Speed. They named their child Speed and his last name is already Racer. But then with a lot of the newer characters, mainly I think it's just Richmond who is a very wealthy villain. Royalton. Royalton. Right. Pretty on the nose. Tells you everything you need to know about his character right off the bat.

23:33
Case
Right. It's actually because we did like, the last time were talking was on your show for the Muppets where they're doing the same thing, where they're like, you know what, we had all these notes about what this character is supposed to be, archetypally speaking. And rather than put in a name generator or flesh it out or anything like that what if we just lean into it? What if we're just like, yep, it's John Bad Guy.

23:54
Sam
Mean. But that's basically the spirit of the great. You know, screw it. Everyone's just going to be exactly what they say it's going to be.

24:06
Case
Yeah, I think it's a good Inspector detector.

24:09
Sophia
That is from the cartoon.

24:13
Case
They're all very on the nose.

24:15
Sophia
They're very on the nose. I think that's part of what makes it a good adaptation of the cartoon is that the pieces that it commits to are goofy, sure, but just seem to work for the world that they've created, even as little, I think, to the strength of this movie, because it is again long. They probably could have trimmed some of the races down. We open on a scene that is not a race. It's young Speed and it sets up a lot of the family dynamics that then kind of get rehashed in the immediate subsequent scene. Right. But I appreciate that they do not spend too much time world building. I think that sometimes the Wachowskis have a habit of wanting to be like, look at this expansive universe we've created, looking at you, Jupiter Ascending.

24:53
Sophia
There's so much cool stuff happening in the background and it's not relevant to the plot of this movie. And here with that first race that we see, you kind of get pushed right in to here is what you need to understand about this movie. There's a lot of really crazy races going on. This family really ingrained in it. This is what we're going to be following. Please do not worry about what is behind the mysterious futuristic city curtain over there. That is problems that do not affect the plot. And for as much as they did make any editorial choices, I think that is one of the ones that lets it flow a little better, even if it does maybe leave you wanting to know more about what time does this take place in, necessarily.

25:29
Sam
Well, I agree with that, too, and especially because comparative to one of my main criticisms, although I have so many of Jupiter Ascending, is that they get so lost in their world building that they never actually complete any of their thesis or any thoughts. And so it just feels like there's too much. Actually, we did that on the podcast. And my thing was like, you fix it by making it a show because there's too much happening. There's too much happening there. And I appreciate the way that they threw everything in. Now, I do have prior knowledge of Speed Racer, and so maybe Case is right, but honestly, get in the car or turn off the movie. This is Speed Racer. We don't have time to go.

26:14
Sophia
Go.

26:16
Sam
I think that this opening is probably the best part of the movie. In fact, the opening and the end is the best part of the movie. Oh, that final race that happens.

26:30
Sophia
Beautiful.

26:31
Sam
In the middle is Lukewarm. Okay? And that's fine. It's fine. I mean, there's some funny moments. I'm not taking anything away. But the opening starts really strong and the end finishes really nice, which is why I ended the movie with a smile. It's just getting through all the high drama in the middle that was a little more arduous. Not because it was necessarily bad, but there were some scenes that I think ran a little too long that felt like not even just the race scenes, but I think some of the dialogue stuff ran a little too long and were not good. There was actually good character development for Pop Racer. I think he actually had a nice arc. He learned his lesson. He tried not to make the same mistake with Speed that he made with his elder son, who is now secretly.

27:28
Sophia
Razor X who, unbeknownst to, is his.

27:30
Sam
Older brother, Rex Racer X. You know, I don't know how the family does not get it, really. But that's part of the joke, right? Like, that's part of the running joke. So I think that there are things and I think. That they at least tried with characters. Like, they tried to give characters more because the animated there's not a lot of life in some of the characters. So, yeah, I think it's a valiant effort. I just think that there were places that needed to be cut down. I don't know if the last, like, the conversation between Royalton and Speed when he's, like, turning him down, it goes on a little longer than it needs to. Like, I think there are some really good moments in there.

28:20
Sam
I think there's value to hearing Speed being kind of wanting to stay virtuous and true to this idea of the integrity of racing as an art and not a commodity. And I think that's really good. But there are parts of Royalton's Speech that I think could have been cut down because we already heard it before. He gave us his spiel, he showed us his factory. We don't need him to sell us again. And I feel like some of it felt a little like the nails already in the wall and now we're just like, banging it harder. We're just cracking the wall. We don't need this.

28:58
Case
Yeah, but I feel like that's the core wachowski of this movie. Like, that scene specifically feels like the things that are going on in Matrix Resurrections where it's like, okay, we're just going to stop and we're going to talk about our experience working within a studio system and why we aren't really doing the same things anymore. Because in this scenario, car racing is just movie making. All the contract stuff, those have to be based on boardroom meetings that they've had coming in and being like, okay, so you're good at your job. But the thing that makes money is actually having a strong marketing arm behind it and having this thing behind it and having budget to do these special effects and all the things that you want to do with your movies, you need us.

29:44
Case
And we're owned by Disney or we're owned by Warner Brothers or we're owned by whatever. One of the things that are external to this movie not doing well is that it opened the week after Iron Man. And in terms of demographics, I have to imagine that there's a pretty strong overlap. We're talking about beloved properties from the 60s that have been updated in ways and that have sharping actors put inside them. And one is this kind of witty update that blew our minds in terms of how you could depict what had been thought to be an impossible power set to have an interesting engagement for a character. He's wearing a helmet all the time, so you don't get to see his face. But the heads up display kind of view screen blew our minds in terms of how they displayed it all cool.

30:31
Case
The actual armor being able to function because it was effective enough CG, that it looked like it was real, like, blew our minds as well. There are all these things about it that were great, and then you get Robert Downey Jr. Being so d*** charming. And this is why I feel like Speed Racer would benefit from being younger. It aged up a lot of the stuff. It feels like it's a mature character who's like, he sleeps around with women and mature might not be the right adolescent fantasy character. He sleeps around with women, he drinks a lot, he hangs out with soldiers and they talk about how he hooked up with all the playmates or maximum, it doesn't matter. It's all very bro y and very like, look how f****** cool this guy is.

31:12
Case
And then a week later, we have this way more earnest movie come out that's coming from the same roots, though. And so that audience is already like, no, I'm just going to go see.

31:22
Sophia
That there. I think you have a point. This is definitely movie should not be PG. It needs to either go up or down. I lean up for, I think, kind of similar reasons to Sam. What you were saying, there's a lot of fluff in the middle of the movie where there's just kind of extra things happening. I think something that's really strong about this is that they are adapting this older property and trying to make it more relevant to a wider audience. But I think in doing so, they lost sight of some of the stuff that they really nailed kind of aging up this character, even if he's supposed to be the same age as he is in the cartoon in modernizing it.

31:58
Sophia
I don't think there's a good way to take this character as it existed in the keep it so childish and still create a movie that is as engaging as they did. I think some of the times where you really see the child issues come through are from the child character lines. Riddle and CHIMCHIM admittedly some of their hijinks. I was like, we don't need as much of this as we're getting.

32:19
Sam
Listen, I love CHIMCHIM not taking anything away from that lovely Chimp. However, that child is disturbingly annoying. And I'm sorry to say it's disturbing to me because I try not to be harsh on children. And it's not the kid, it's not the actor. I'm not attacking the actor. He was just doing what he was told. But heaven for Betsy. I mean, stop answering the door if you're going to run screaming from it every time. At least he's consistent. Like, he's consistent in his being annoying, but I found him very grating. The monkey amazing. And CHIMCHIM Cakes monkey, played by two.

32:59
Sophia
Monkey actors as credited amazing professionals.

33:05
Sam
They should have won awards. They were wonderful. Enjoyed it very much, even though they play a murderer. And I'm okay with that because it's self defense and they are innocent and that is fine. Sometimes bad guys need to be slaughtered with a wrench. To their head. Direct blow.

33:25
Sophia
That kind of goes gets up to why I think it should be PG 13 because it felt like the Spidal and CHIMCHIM scenes a lot of the times and then the colorfulness of the cinematography and our production design are what kind of de aged it. But the violence and the brutality of the races, I think makes them more engaging. Because if I was just watching Mario Kart level antics without seeing consequences, I don't think I would have been as pulled into the actual adrenaline of the races were watching and the urgency that they were all feeling. I think it would have kind of taken me personally. I mean, obviously in this scenario, I'm not a DG target audience for it, so maybe there's a case to be made for that.

34:04
Sophia
But for me at least, I think committing to the PG 13 rating and accepting like, hey, we're going for a slightly older skew. Probably not adults, but definitely not children, could have helped win the marketing push for this to prime people for what they were actually going to be watching, as opposed to taking it down and then having parents show up and be like, hey, this is not what I signed up for. If it was a movie as released, obviously, if they scaled back on some of the violence and everything, I think yeah.

34:31
Case
It also is dealing with the issue that Speed Racer itself is more violent than people. Remember, I watched a video last night of just like, here's all the times where they just open fire.

34:40
Sophia
I have seen that compilation.

34:42
Case
Yeah. Media that was consumable by children in general has sort of shifted away from some of that violence and also especially like foreign media that used to just be like, oh, well, it's a cartoon. We can just put it up on TV. And even if it was meant more for all ages, american perception of a lot of this stuff is like, oh, it's for kids. And so I think a lot of people took Speed Racer as being inherently youthful as a property, and it's got a little kid with a pet chimpanzee that's like running around in all those.

35:15
Sophia
Really trailers doing little trailer antics. When you mark its main tie in campaign is with candy brands marketed to children, and then parents would see the trailer and be like, don't know if I should bring my kids to this, because it seems like there's a lot of gratuitous violence. It just kind of feels like they were there is. It feels like it was stuck between two ratings. It landed on PG, and that's not really where it should have been. It should have gone to either direction. Personally, I like it going to PG 13 more. I think that it allows them to do something more fun with the franchise and with the concept of it all. I don't think this movie should have a sequel in any form of the word. So maybe franchise isn't appropriate.

35:49
Sophia
But with the property as opposed to going PG, I think that ends up making a slightly better than average kids movie when instead it could be this fun, different action piece.

36:01
Sam
But I would like to say because I felt there was a little harsh on Spurtle. I will say that the first scene with him and his lovable chimp watching anime and then getting so into it and kind of like the cartoon background coming out where they were going to battle, I actually thought that was really wonderful. I thought it was like a good, fun nod to just general anime, cartoons, that kind of thing. And the way that kids get into that. And also to set us up for the violent nature that both of those characters truly inhabit. It's just innate in them, clearly. So I saw that. That actually set me up for where they were going to go with their characters. And I want to give a thumbs up to that scene and thank you for the warning.

36:51
Sophia
I don't think all of their antics should have been cut from the movie, but I definitely think they could have cut back a little. Like, I don't need to see like a full five minutes of them going through the factory on different mopeds and things.

37:01
Sam
I think it's important for them to do a couple of sneaky things. I think the sneaky moment when they snuck in the back of Speed's car when he's talking to Trixie, by the way, I would cut some of that scene because I was kind of uncomfortable. Like, I was like, I'm a grown adult and I shouldn't be uncomfortable. The dialogue in here makes me cringe a little bit. I don't know why. Just two or three lines. It just needs to be a little bit shorter. And our savior Spurtle needs to come up sooner. And in that scene, I think that's good because we want him later on to come out during the race and show that he has a propensity for sneaking into places he doesn't belong. And we need him to kind of pop up there. So I think that's fine.

37:47
Sam
But there are a couple of scenes even in the Factory, he follows Speeds to Royalton's Factory when he goes to turn him down. And there's all these scenes where it's cutting away to him and running around, like messing things up. And I was just like, oh, are they going to use that? Is Royalton going to use that as leverage? Like, oh, these kids have done property damage, but instead he just kicks them out. So I was like, so there's actually no reason to actually have them here.

38:20
Case
Well, they did see the car spears or whatever.

38:23
Sam
They were right. They did see the spear hook, I guess. But I was just like I just felt like there was too much screen time for them for that to be the only thing.

38:35
Case
Yeah, I fully agree.

38:36
Sophia
I agree.

38:37
Case
Kids sidekicks in general are hard to get right, especially as media has sort of advanced an argument to be made about this is a superhero thing. Even if it's not officially it's not a comic book superhero, but it's still like, yeah, no, he's this impressive person who with the power of his impressive driving is able to stop crime. That's Speed Racer right there. A lot of media now allows us to puts our viewpoint with the hero, with the superhero, whereas a lot of golden age and early stuff would put the viewpoint for the child audience in a child character existing in this world where look at the cool older brother. In this case, literally like Speed Racer is the cool older brother.

39:23
Case
And we relate to Speed Racer in the same way because he was also dealing with the cool older brother in the form of unbeknownst to him, unbeknownst.

39:30
Sophia
To Speed Racer X, his older brother Rex Racer, long lost in the Maltese Ice caves.

39:38
Case
But media just has moved away from that kind of presentation. Like, typically we actually want our viewpoint character to be the protagonist of these interactions, which is always it is the difficulty that Superman has nowadays. Because when Superman is viewed from the perspective of Jimmy Olsen, it's easy to be like, oh, well, yeah, no, he's f****** rad. But when you're like, oh, but I am Superman, then you have to deal with angst. You have to deal with an internal monologue. You have to deal with all the stuff that isn't necessarily going to be as interesting when the character doesn't have any sort of faults and foibles. So here they're adopting a thing that is from just a bygone era of media that we just don't really deal with the same way. And it's hard to make it fit.

40:18
Sam
Can I also just say that he lost the lottery on family, right? Like I was actually thinking how messed that was, right?

40:28
Sophia
Bridal spritle.

40:30
Sam
Like, what? Why is it just because you were so sad about Rex that you were like, well, this one we're going to not give. We can't eraser name.

40:39
Sophia
Give him a racer name, or he'll just go down the exact same path as his other two brothers.

40:43
Sam
It's still not going to be like Adam or like Matt. Hi, Matt.

40:50
Sophia
Talking to a family where one man's name appears to be Pops with no given first name other than that Pops.

40:57
Case
Racer, full stop, and Mom Racer. And they lean into that here. I appreciate that. I think it's great in that regard. And god d*** it, of course the older brother died in a car wreck and his name was Rex.

41:09
Sam
It's very sad.

41:10
Case
Yeah.

41:12
Sam
But I guess they just don't want to jinx that third child. Just give him a safe name.

41:18
Case
Yeah, I mean, his last name is still Razor. So no matter what, he's still got a cool name of some form. At a certain point, if you just have a gnarly last name, they'll find a nickname for him.

41:31
Sophia
He'll be like Skip.

41:32
Case
He'll be like Skip Racer.

41:34
Sophia
Big upgrade from Spritle to Skip.

41:38
Case
Skip is not a name that you could easily make work, but if your last name is Racer, it works.

41:42
Sam
I know that I'm derailing this whole thing, but don't you feel like you would feel like your parents had lower expectations of you?

41:51
Case
Sure. But their first son, they named the manner that he died, as far as they understand.

41:57
Sam
No, they named him Rex, which is like, it stands for King. Like, they f****** named him King, dude.

42:03
Case
I know, but it's also Car know?

42:06
Sam
Like but they named him Rex. Okay.

42:09
Case
Yeah, it's a cool name.

42:11
Sam
Rex is the king. That's a cool name.

42:14
Case
The bigger issue is that they named the middle child, the one who very clearly has ADHD and has severe learning difficulties. And none of the parents or teachers are prepared to deal with the fact that it's like, no, he's hyper fixated on racing right now, and he cannot pay attention in class. Like problem student. No. Clearly a child that you need to treat. They named him f****** Speed. What were your hopes for this child?

42:38
Sam
They didn't know. They didn't know that he was going to be, like, neurodivergent. They just named him Speed. We have derailed this completely.

42:46
Sophia
Yeah. I do one final point on this. I do think that the only thing that would make me as Spritle feel worse is that there's a close family friend whose name is Sparky, which is just better, and he's not even related to me. Just another guy with a cool name. He's been brought in, right?

43:00
Sam
Yeah. Yes. Sophia hit the nail on the know. I take it back. I understand why the kid's annoying now. I'd act out.

43:10
Case
Like I didn't hate him, but it is too much with, like, the scene where it was too much, especially was the factory scene, which is what you mentioned, Sam. So there were some Wall E vibes going on there with them all kind of moving around. That was probably the spot where the unreality of everything was just a bit too much for, like it was, like, Segways.

43:34
Sophia
It is Segways because recently they did a big wachowski storage auction and the Segway from Speed Racer was up for auction and it went for thousands of dollars.

43:44
Case
Yeah. So they're all, like, racing around with it. There's a lot of white going on in addition to lots of all the colors, and it's a lot of people on green screen, and it's just so much, visually speaking. And then they're causing havoc, and it just felt like, oh, well, we're required to do the I, even though I can defend that ultimately. It was, like, cool. They uncover the thing that Royalton is hinting at how they're going to cheat. I didn't think that was necessary. I thought it was bad and mixed.

44:16
Sophia
In with that, too, as they're kind of doing their big wipe movement through Royalton giving his big speech about capitalism and the true heart of racing, while Speed is also simultaneously losing a big race that they're also kind of cutting to. So there's a lot going on in this scene already.

44:31
Case
I really liked him explaining how he's going to lose.

44:34
Sophia
I love the Royalton explaining how he's going to lose. I love seeing that happen in real time in the race. But every once in a while they would also just throw in a spider and CHIMCHIM antic because they have to uncover the spear hook in the same scene. And I think that they could have taken out a lot of the spider and CHIMCHIM cutaways and instead just focused entirely on the very dramatic crisis moment that's happening. And at the very end, we can remember that they're there because really, it wasn't important to be constantly aware that they were in the factory.

45:01
Sophia
So I think this is a good example of one of the places in the film that they could have done some editing to maybe tighten the runtime a bit and also help take out some of the more harder to translate elements from the original cartoon.

45:14
Sam
I think also at this moment, we have like, you're having a very serious moment and they're throwing in what is supposed to be funny. It's not what's supposed to be funny comedy moments. And I guess maybe that's also to maybe if someone brought children to keep them engaged, but it feels actually distracting from the actual message and makes the message and that scene feel more long winded than it ought to feel. And so instead of infusing fun, it actually drags that whole sequence down, even though technically it's actually a very good framing device. Right? It's very similar to what we saw in the beginning, except the beginning is reflecting on the past and then this is a glimpse into the future and it's like it's happening, like he's saying it what's going to just happen.

46:12
Sam
And then you come out of this spiral and exactly everything that was in that speech is what's happened. Right? And that's really great because it's a nice bookend from that first half of the movie, but because you have all of these scenes with chim and Spurtle just like coming in and infusing what should have been fun, it just feels a lot more really it takes a while to get to your actual point, right?

46:41
Case
And this movie is too long across the board for the PG version of the movie that it is, especially the g cut that I'm going to pitch later. This movie can't get away with its runtime, even honestly, if it was a more mature audience. And that's the only scenario where you could even pretend that an over 2 hours long living cartoon is like an okay setting, having it be over 2 hours and a PG movie. And you're like, oh, well, we padded out the scene with extra bits of the kids running around. I'm like, the length is the first problem. The kids sidekick is the secondary thing. The audience is checked out because the scene is too long, not because we didn't spend enough time with our eight year it classic Wachowski problem. That said, before we move on from Spritle really?

47:30
Case
From CHIMCHIM, I want to bring up, well, two things. One, I want to explain why we keep calling CHIMCHIM a murderer. We've alluded to it a few times. So CHIMCHIM, at multiple points, picks up a monkey wrench ha. And uses it to beat people over the head with it. And it's played for laughs, or at least as much as laughs in a fight. Are there's like, no blood? It's just like, oh, I got hit really hard, doozy and fall over kind of stuff. But it is a chimpanzee beating a person with a piece of steel. That in the Fast and the Furious movies, is why Dominic Toretto goes to jail. And Dominic Toretto is not as strong as a chimpanzee. So that's why we're calling CHIMCHIM a murderer.

48:10
Case
Because I went on a tear on Twitter, which might still exist when this episode drops, that you can find about how CHIMCHIM is a murderer. So that's what keep alluding to. But also, CHIMCHIM created some problems for the production because one of the two apes bit someone on set innocent.

48:29
Sam
I don't believe it. It was that person's fault.

48:31
Case
Oh, I'm sure that the circumstances were pushed and then the trainer hit the ape, which was also bad. And so the American Humane Association had problems with them and PETA had problems with them. Now, I don't really care what Fetus thinks about anything, frankly, but the fact that there was violence done towards a chimpanzee is a problem.

48:53
Sam
Yeah.

48:53
Case
And they were in that circumstance, which is a problem. And I realized it was 2008 where we hadn't really nailed how to do fake animals quite yet. If any movie could have gotten away with it could have been this one. But I also understand just wanting to have a chimpanzee like an actual chimpanzee.

49:10
Sophia
Yeah, there's kind of the old adage in film like, what are the two things that are the worst to work with on set? It's children and animals because of very reasonable child labor laws. And also, animals are animals and sometimes they're just not going to do what they're trained to do. And so anytime you put one in a movie, there's bound to be some chaos behind the scenes. I'm surprised there's honestly not more of it in this movie.

49:31
Case
Right? Yeah. So I just think having an actual chimpanzee was like playing with fire and people actually got burned, including the chimpanzee. So I don't know. This is post the King Kong movie with Andy Serkis. We could have gotten Andy Serkis doing a trifecta of Ape presentations.

49:47
Sam
I was like, what are you doing, friend? Let's get their species right. We just went through five movies.

49:53
Case
I know, I know.

49:55
Sophia
You got to be on this.

49:57
Sam
You got to be careful. Our Ape overlords will be listening to this archive.

50:01
Case
That's true. When genetic testing brings back Gigantopithecus, we will all be crushed under the thumb of the massive.

50:08
Sam
Orangutans when they choose their pet serpent humans, I plan to be on the list. And if you're not with me, you're going down, friend. I'm selling you out. That's all I'm saying.

50:19
Case
I will do my best. I'm pretty sure I've made it very clear that I'm a big fan of Abes. Yeah, hopefully they'll be like, oh, yeah. No, we like this one.

50:28
Sam
He knows so much.

50:31
Case
He just keeps talking about how the differences in wrist structure between gorillas and chimpanzees indicate that they separately evolved knuckle walking. Anyway, moving on.

50:42
Sam
I just wanted to proud of you. And ashamed of you.

50:44
Case
Yes, of course. Let's be clear. I am a monster. The movie is definitely trying to play with this 60s aesthetic. We talked about how it's got this style that it's retro future. Yada, yada. I love some of the spots that they do in it. Like when we see the inside of their house and we see the flat screen TV, but it's still shaped like a CRT, I was like, F***, I want that flat screen TV. And that was before flat screen TVs were becoming I mean, they were obviously on the rise, but this is the era where plasma TVs were like, $10,000 instead of now it's like a couple of my God, I loved the way they made all this future tech feel also kind of homey at times. That was really cool.

51:35
Sam
Yeah.

51:36
Sophia
I think that carries over into a lot of the production design just kind of broadly, too, because if you look at the way that Emile Hirsch is dressed and styled for this movie, his hair is a little bit blue in the way that maybe a cartoon character with black hair would have that slight tint to it. And some of his costumes are racer clothing in the color palette of the classic ascot look from the cartoon. And I think they do a good job of kind of melding the older aesthetics and carrying the spirit of that over. Like you were saying, with the flat screen that looks like this rounded retro TV. It's the spirit of the old show, but it clearly exists in a modern sensibility in a modern design sense.

52:17
Case
Yeah, the style choices I thought, were across the board just, like, f****** perfect. I loved all the different racetracks having very different kind of settings to it. Those all look great. So one of my problems, actually, with this movie is that we don't get the big rundowns of racers until the later races. It's like basically a thing for the second half of the movie. And I love that we get these weird casts of characters where it's just like, here's all the racers that we're dealing with.

52:41
Sophia
Spoiler girl who throws beehive.

52:45
Case
Some of the punts were ridiculous. I had a visceral sense memory when we got to the Viking team where this is not a beowulf rant, Sam.

52:55
Sam
This is not but I was preparing myself. I was no, I was just waiting for you to be like and it reminded me of Grendel. And I was going to be like, I'm done. I'm out. Goodbye.

53:05
Case
Nope. Although they do throw bees. No, but this movie was just unlocking memories for me left and right. And so one of those unlocked was like, oh, right. I remember we just one weekend at my fraternity in college, had a Viking night where we all made tinfoil Viking hats and bought stuffed animals that we shredded to make fake furs that we'd wear. And then we had just ordered 15 buckets of KFC and just were just gross eating meat together. And I was like, oh, man, that feels like that. And they're being bribed with the same kind of pageantry in this weird retro future setting. I loved it. I love that we're not even going to deal with trying to explain like, oh, why are there Vikings? Why the f*** not?

53:50
Sam
Why not?

53:51
Sophia
A lot of those characters, too, are ported over from snake Oiler was frequently a villain in Speed Racer episodes past. So that's also kind of a nice little Easter egg for people who know what's going on. My favorite version of this is there is the monster car, which is one of my dad's favorite episodes of the cartoon. It's this big red truck that Racer X kind of does a whole spy mission in the beginning of the movie.

54:11
Case
With, yeah, I love that scene.

54:13
Sophia
Really fun scene. Maybe they could have cut it down a little bit in terms of how much it's actually relevant to the whole movie. But it's super fun. But that big red truck, that's the monster car from the Speed Racer cartoon, snake Oily. He's a frequent villain from it. So I think that they're really like pulling from the elements that are fun and goofy in all the right ways and just kind of like dropping them into the world that they already fit into because they've done a lot of the scene setting to make everything just sort of be this mention of disbelief accepted.

54:36
Sophia
And then you get to just kind of party it up with all of these various different villainous car drivers that all have their own motivations, whether that's furs and meat for the Viking team or just a lot of money for the Pink Lady team. That's also there.

54:50
Case
Yeah, there were moments that felt very like 66 Batman to. Me specifically the truck scene with Racer X. Especially like when all the goons are like grabbing guns and going to the doors and you're like, oh, they're on a truck. Because at first you're like, oh, they're in an office. But then when the racers are all themed and all bribed and it's like, okay, let's beat people up. But especially the Racer X stuff because Racer X really I had a moment where I'm like, oh, you could just do this with the Batmobile. And it's like, no, he's oh, okay. So it's just Batman in this moment here. And that's awesome. I f****** adore these moments here.

55:25
Sam
I also love the fact that the bad guy had piranhas because as a kid growing up, there were two things, especially in 80s cartoons, that were the scariest things and there was quicksand and piranhas.

55:35
Case
I was going to say I knew you were going to say quicksand was the other thing because those two that's.

55:42
Sophia
Like the one thing missing from the Casa Cristo race is no one fell into any quicksand when they were going through the desert.

55:46
Sam
Exactly. Honestly, I was waiting for the quicksand because it's so funny. There was a time in my young life as a child where I was preparing myself for quicksand and for piranhas. I don't live in a place where either of those are even present, but it just seemed like such a big thing. And so I got the piranhas early on. And of course, I always love when a bad guy loves an evil animal. Well, not evil. I mean, it's not evil, but like animal that can do lots of damage and treats them like they're babies. I do. I always love that. Like, oh, no, my babies, they're going to die. And it's like, sir, they would eat you. They would eat you. But I love that. He loved it. So I love that.

56:34
Sam
But yeah, I felt really sad that there was no quicksand in the desert. I mean, how fun would that have been when they were in the brawl with the gangsters? If they had kicked one and one fell in quicksand? They're like, oh, no quicksand. And they just turned around and just left. I don't know. That would just be for Sam really big knocks.

56:54
Sophia
The Speed Racer that we do not once see a car sinking into quicksand in the middle race of the movie when they have that brawl in the desert.

57:02
Case
Yeah, it would have been easy to put in there. And it is surprising once you actually say it out loud. They're crossing off all the natural checkboxes. Yeah.

57:10
Sam
I mean, for me, it could have just been a person you could have just replaced because I don't want to make this movie any longer than it already is. That is not part of the goal. But any one of those other shots with someone getting kicked could have resulted in them falling in some quicksand. That's all I'm saying.

57:30
Case
Yeah. Or it could have been a good opportunity to remind everyone about the Quick Save feature that they all have. Like, if the car fell into quicksand and then it's starting to sink, and then the green goo fills up the cockpit and then checks them. Just to remind you, this movie is while there is a lot of gun violence and there is a lot of Piranhas eating body parts and you don't.

57:53
Sophia
See a lot of blood, it's, like, violent, but it's not brutal, if that makes sense, in the way that Fast.

57:59
Sam
And Furious Piranhas only ate one finger body part. That other thing could have been from anything. It was just it was we don't know from what, is what I'm saying. I don't know why I'm defending the Piranhas, but I just feel like I wanted to be clear. They weren't eating lots of people. They weren't overeating. They were just doing what they got.

58:24
Case
That's all right. No, Sam, we've established that one of your things is having sympathy for villainous characters in productions that we're looking at because their motivation makes sense.

58:36
Sam
I never thought that I was that type of person until I joined this podcast. I didn't think that I would be apologist for so many different villains. But I think the Piranhas deserve it. I don't think any of the other villains in this movie deserve it. I think they all deserved it to go down, including the one that CHIMCHIM murdered. I believe that he had that coming, but the that it wasn't their fault.

59:02
Case
This is true. But suffice it to say, most of this movie is relatively blood free. Like, all the car combat stuff is supposed to be pretty safe. And aside from them cheating, so they constantly have this thread of like, oh, well, there's no cameras here, or there's so much dust, anything could be happening in that cloud. In theory, it's just cars having certain tricks that they can use. In terms of what crosses the line, I'm not really clear because can we talk about the Mach Five for a second? And how f****** cool it is? But also all right, so the jump thing, all the cars have it. It's the Mach Five thing in terms of pop culture. Like the jump stilts jump, jump jacks. Okay. Yeah. Those are so f****** cool.

59:52
Case
It adds all this element of movement to a race that is already fast and going in one direction. But here we add vertical stuff and that's so cool. And all these cars have tricks like that. And then they have, again, a gun or a catapult that throws a TREB biche, if you will. But the Mach Five has f****** saw blades that just pops out. How is that legal?

01:00:18
Sophia
A series of buttons on the front that do different things. Some of them are like sending out a homing pigeon or making it able to go through water, which we don't see too much in this movie because they choose to focus more on the saw blades and the jump jack of it all, which is great for movement. I do think that is kind of part of the reason I want it to maybe skew a little older is that the big villainous item to include in a car is a spear hook that makes you hold on to a car next to you from underneath. And that doesn't really feel like it is keeping up with the threat level that's been established in all the previous races and what the other cars are doing. A spearhook kind of feels like it's underhanded and cheating.

01:00:58
Sophia
But is it dangerous? Maybe not.

01:01:03
Case
So, I mean, because the spear hook is just being Kirby and Smash brothers and eating them and then just jumping off the not and assuming that you can't fly back up. Or Donkey Kong, like picking up sorry, mixing your video game metaphors here.

01:01:20
Sam
Fine.

01:01:21
Case
But then the other ones are, let's have a flail, or like three spike balls on chains and I'm just going to spin around as I drive and kill people.

01:01:36
Sophia
Not for nothing. There's a character who Racer X, who, unbeknownst to Speed, is his long lost brother, Rex. Racer at one point flips his car and punches another driver just in the face with his real hand and then lands, which that is one of my favorite shots of the movie.

01:01:55
Sam
It's like if you've run out of things, to pop out of your car just to do it was great. I loved that. Totally keep that.

01:02:02
Sophia
And that whole scramble in that Casa Cristo race is some of the most fun that you can have with the movie. It's goofy, it's silly, it's a little bit weirdly, brutal, but everyone in it seems to be having a great time. You get the sense that both the cast and the characters are loving what's happening. It's fun to watch in the way that it's shot and structured. And I think that losing some of that brutality from that scene would make it a weaker movie. Which is why I tend to lean PG 13 as opposed to G. Yeah.

01:02:30
Sam
I actually think that when it comes to that scene, too, because it's like Pop is so opposed to him going to that race because it's supposed to be dangerous. I don't think you can make it any less dangerous because that's kind of what that race is.

01:02:45
Sophia
I think you would need to lean a lot more into the difficulty of the actual driving itself on the switchbacks and the mountains because this is the race that Rex supposedly died in. And so it needs to be dangerous. It needs to be difficult.

01:03:00
Case
See, I just don't think that dangerous equals necessarily a higher rating. So all of the violence in the actual races are, for the most part, relatively tame. It's not that far removed from either the original cartoon or something like Wacky Racers or Mario Kart. We keep bringing up that racing has this kind of potential goofy kind of violence that's not at people. It's still cars on cars violence, which is somewhat sanitized. I don't feel like it has to be like a higher rating. Yeah, sure, when snake oiler just pulls out a gun, that's a different story. But I don't think all the violence necessarily equals like, oh, it has to be a more mature setting because I think that, like I said, what we get in this movie for the most part is relatively tame, even if it's like high stress.

01:03:51
Case
And it might be different for someone who's been in a really bad car accident or something where they have actual trauma associated with it. But I think for a child audience looking at this, it's just like, oh, wow, cars are cool. Oh, cool. They use the jump jacks to do a flying kick with their car somehow.

01:04:09
Sophia
Yeah. I feel like the violence is always on the precipice of becoming, like, Mortal Kombat esque, but because it doesn't have the higher rating, it can't quite fully commit to some of the goofy is the wrong word to use to describe Mortal Kombat. But at the same time it is exactly the correct word to use to describe the combat in that game. In the 90s movie, at any point, someone might whip out a high low bar and do a big spin before they do a kick and that's hilarious, but also then they're going to kick someone's spine out.

01:04:34
Sophia
And I don't think that I want to necessarily see the gritty, gory version of Speed Racer, but I do feel like the frequency of the times that we see the Eject feature pop up and in a G rated movie, I could see how you might need to maybe they're beach balls instead of big spike balls on the back of the car or something. Just a little bit more sanitized to appeal to. Because especially for American G rated audiences generally, stuff tends to get a little bit toned down. And I think a lot of the strength of this movie is that everything is toned up. And while I don't think you need to push it much farther, I think accepting that, hey, this is what the level we're operating on is. It's not that we are trying to appeal necessarily to a fully child audience.

01:05:13
Sophia
We are making it a bit more of a mature movie in some ways, could have allowed it to continue to exist in levels it did and even maybe push it just a smidge further so that randomly having a gun pulled out by snake oiler is not as much of an abrupt moment as it might have been.

01:05:29
Case
Yeah, I just feel like with this movie, with the level of did either of you have a thought on your most recent watch of The Hunger Games? I had a moment there when I was watching it where I was like, oh, well, it's not quite that far. And that was like a PG 13 ish level of what that violence was going to be. It's like here's a little bit more toned down, where it's more like the aesthetic of this movie is very similar to a Spy Kids or a Sharkboy and Lava Girl in terms of, like it's all green screen. It's live actors kind of stuff. And then it's edited like an epic rap battle of history with all the crossovers and the surreal nature of the backgrounds.

01:06:12
Case
That's just why I kind of keep coming back to this idea of, well, if it was a little more general audience because the expectations for what you're going into for this style of movie as a movie as opposed to an Internet video, people have an expectation of a certain level of realism in their stuff. And even though the next year Avatar.

01:06:36
Sophia
Came out, I think that the aesthetic of this movie did a lot to confuse people. And I think that gets to the point of maybe why both of us want to go in different directions but kind of agree, like, it can't have stayed PG. It needed to choose a direction. Clearly the thing that's wrong is the rating and how it was marketed. But which way should it have gone is the question. And I think that comes down to a matter of opinion ultimately. But for me, this movie's style, while it is bright and colorful and cartoony in many ways, is kind of doing to movie making what an impressionist painting is doing to art. It is like, okay, we understand what a movie is. We know how to make a real movie.

01:07:11
Sophia
Now let's use the medium in new and exciting ways to create something that is at once both a story that you can consume and a feeling that you can watch. And to me that they pull it off exceptionally well. I think the Wachowskis did a bang up job of capturing the idea of like, yes, it's bright and colorful, but there's really high level techniques being used in altering it. So, sure, wiping with a person is a very internet video style of edit to do. I know I've done them in some video edits in the past, but here they're integrated so seamlessly to the very CGI backgrounds that at no point did I necessarily feel like I was watching Spy Kids 3d. Game over.

01:07:47
Sophia
Even though they are using a lot of the same technologies to make these movies, and they're doing it on such a higher budget than those movies ever did, too. That ultimately, I think, as much as the bright and colorfulness of it all is maybe unusual for a big blockbuster release, as this was intended to be. I think it works here to just make this movie more unique. And I think that because it is so colorful, especially, and there is so much CGI, people tend to look at it and say, this is a kids movie. This is for children, this is for a younger audience. But I think that there is a lot of validity to having a bright, colorful movie intended for slightly older audiences, even if it is a harder sell in the marketing.

01:08:30
Sophia
I think that there's been sort of like this resurgence of people going back to this movie, particularly in online movie people, and being like, wow, this was really good, actually. And the fact that is coming around is because it is it's really gorgeous cinematography, very intentionally done. It is an impressionist painting of a movie in its surrealism and its weird color wipes. And there could have been, I think, a very strong response from audiences, even though they are normally primed for realism in cinema, to see this and appreciate what it's doing on levels that it's doing it and be along for the ride, because I think it's almost too much for kids in the same way that it works for a slightly older audience. Like a five year old seeing this would be gripping the arms of their.

01:09:15
Sam
Seat like, whoa, yeah. It's just blown away by that, literally their skin falling off their face because it's just so bright. There's so much happening. I actually really love the way this movie looks. I think that it's actually like a great nod to animation in general. And this idea of this new, kind of weird, surreal space that they have you in. It actually fits with the fact that we actually do not know what time period we're in. Everything is surreal. This is its own world, and we're being sucked into that. And I actually really like it. I love the color. I am very adamant about one of the things that I hate about the DCU is that it's all brown and gray. And I do not like that. I feel like it's very boring looking.

01:10:06
Sam
And again, if you're a Snyder fan and you have a problem with that, you know where to find Kate's, because I'm not anywhere you can find me. And I just personally, just like, I don't need everything shot in. Like, I do not need to see things like that. And so it's so nice when I see things in color. Like, automatically I'm going to like that movie more if there is a wide variety of color, because I would say, like the last three decades even. It just feels like the palette for movie making is so dull, gray, black, brown. It's like feeling so real, so gritty. And in order to make a serious movie, you've got it. And I really appreciate that this movie leans into the cartoony aspect, like it leans into the source material. Right?

01:11:04
Sam
You're going to have these moments where there's actual animation coming in. You're going to have moments where it's basically all green screens. But no matter what, it is going to be colorful. I mean, the end, which is like one of the most beautiful things when.

01:11:19
Case
He finishes basically 2001, where it all just becomes like a blur of color.

01:11:25
Sam
Just like, yes, I love dating him. And he goes through this blur of color and then he stops and there's just silence. And for the first time, there's no music. There's no sound of the crowds, which you had this whole last scene right, this whole race where he very triumphantly and they just give this moment of quiet, and then you just see and it almost feels like starlights kind of blinking and flashing. And you see it on his visor and he lifts it and you see it from his eyes and you realize that as it comes. And of course, you probably knew it before, but it's all the cameras, it's all the people that are realizing that he was and it's just such a beautiful scene. It's so triumphant because you're in that moment with speed.

01:12:10
Sam
It feels very intimate because it's very quiet and it's just him in the moments after. And then it's just like everything rushes in and it's really great. It's really beautiful filmmaking. That's a feeling. That's a moment that it's gorgeous.

01:12:25
Case
I wonder if, though, us having this appreciation for it now is part of that we have been primed to appreciate it more than were at the time when this movie came out. This is the golden era of orange and teal for f****** everything, where color correction had gone overboard. Yeah, we've started to get into overly sepia, overly flat colors on a lot of stuff. Yeah, I might have a couple of bright colors in there, but it's being shot literally on flatter color gradient cameras. Like, that's the whole Marvel issue. And this is not this is literally coming out a week after Iron Man first appeared. So we haven't gotten there yet. So we're really in the phase of the Michael Bay stuff. And again, Avatar comes out the next year.

01:13:12
Case
We're at this point still seeing a lot of colors in our blockbusters and this one's just like so much more. But we haven't been starved for it yet. We have not learned to appreciate it at the point when this movie came out. And since then we've kind of come back to it and been like, oh yeah, that was good. Why don't we have these anymore? And part of the reason we don't have it anymore is because movies like the original Matrix came out where everything was kind of green inside the Matrix and kind of blue outside.

01:13:39
Sophia
That kind of gets through. I have a lot of film industry hot takes because I very briefly worked today before going freelance. And there's this very sense of literalism in blockbuster filmmaking, especially these days, where it's like, we have to show things as they are without changing the color palette too much. We're not going for an artful look. We're going for here is a thing presented very straight. And I think that this movie is much more interpretive which is a much bigger ask of your audience and case. Like you're saying, if they're not primed for it and they're not excited about that kind of artfulness, it's not going to really land with just a general viewer. I think this movie is doing in its style to the Speed Racer cartoon what into the Spider verse is doing with the comic book. Right.

01:14:23
Sophia
They're pulling from these sources that are very different from the very literal blockbuster movie like Iron Man, I think looks pretty good all these years later. And as far as MCU movies goes, I think it's one of the better shot ones. Try not to get too spicy on the MCU on this because people can definitely at know and it works for that movie, even know it's pulling from comic book sources. It's adapting it in a way that makes sense for a blockbuster movie. I think Speed Racer is similarly a triumph of adaptation from the media that it's pulling from. But instead of going into more of pulling it into the framework that we expect a movie to exist in, it's allowing the original medium to shine through in the final product.

01:15:06
Sophia
And that can be difficult to get your audience to get on board with, particularly when they weren't primed for it, which I think that is a good point. Like 2008, this was a pretty unique looking movie compared to what was also in theaters and compared to other movies that people might have associated it with like The Fast and the Furious, right?

01:15:24
Case
Which, especially the early ones were very colorful big race movies. And there's a lot of effects that wouldn't feel out of place in those movies that are in this one. But it's just dialed up to, you know, I was thinking that this movie kind of reminds me of the Angley Hulk movie in some regards and that has a similar issue where there's a lot of very literal tropes from the source material being pulled into here's. The representation. The big thing is all the panel structure on it all. And here you're dealing with Speed Racer stuff. There's shots that are almost like exactly from the show and that's very cool. But it is forcing a transition and it's forcing meta knowledge on the audience because if you've never seen Speed Racer before, you don't care about the callbacks to the original Speed Racer.

01:16:20
Sophia
Right.

01:16:21
Case
And this movie is just sort of asking audiences to be ready for that kind of stuff.

01:16:27
Sophia
I do feel like they do a decent job just through the look of the movie of even if you don't necessarily catch the reference, it's still a shot that works for what's around it. But it does mean that the rest of the movie is being pulled into the levels that a Speed Racer adaptation works on. So even if you are a fan of the original cartoon and you just aren't ready for this stylistic choice, it can be off putting. I think that's a big part of why this movie is so polarizing for a lot of people, because it is asking a lot to have someone watch the opening sequence and then continue to watch that aesthetic for another 2 hours. I love it. I think this is super fun. I love a weird artsy movie.

01:17:01
Sophia
I'm a big fan of modern art, but totally understand that someone might be off put by a very bright primary color palette with swirling colors, no real hard cut transitions, a lot of very interpretive choices in the edit room. It isn't for everyone. It doesn't have the mass appeal that a lot of blockbusters need. I can't really defend that it is going to be polarizing.

01:17:25
Case
Yeah, I think the big takeaway for this conversation is that I think we all kind of agree this is, generally speaking, a good movie, but it's not for everyone. And the thing is, it was very expensive, and so that not for everyone is also kind of why it didn't do very well.

01:17:40
Sam
Yeah.

01:17:41
Case
But before we break for pitches, I have one thing I want to bring up that I think might actually have helped a bit for this movie, just in general, which is that the sense of scale, I think, is really whack in a lot of stuff. Specifically, there's a shot where Speed, it's at the last race, and they're in this giant arena, and it's like they're all, like, looking around and it's like, oh, it's huge, but it's, like, very level looking right directly at them, like chest level. It's not at a low angle. We're not seeing everything is big because we're being informed that it's all big, but there's no point where we, the audience, feel like everything is towering over us, and that includes these giant racetracks that they're on.

01:18:21
Case
The realization of just how big the world that they're in and what the scale of the people are in this world, I think, is just not quite there. And I think it's a product of shooting against flat actors against a green screen and not really taking into account both angles, but also lenses for cameras. And maybe that wasn't a thing that they could have even really done at that time. So I don't know. But no matter what, there's just multiple spots where the scale of the actors just doesn't feel appropriate for the setting that they're trying to present.

01:18:54
Sophia
Yeah, I like it when it pops up in relation to the race cars or the tracks looking larger than life. Because in this world, racing is the only thing that matters. And so they should be larger than life, but sometimes it bleeds over into their house. And at that point, I'm like, I don't know if this weirdness with scale is working for me anymore quite so much.

01:19:10
Sam
Yeah, I agree with the racetracks. I always think that it's really cool, especially that the people are near them. Although there was one scene where the racetrack is right over people's heads, and I was like, I'm sure that's not sanitary or safe because accidents are clearly happening all the time on these tracks. And also cars leak. Like, I don't know a lot about cars, but I know that they leak. And what they leak is not good.

01:19:38
Sophia
If your car is leaking a lot while you're driving, you might have slightly bigger issues than the sanitary nature of your race.

01:19:44
Sam
Let me just say that this is a race where a lot of things get blown up. So some of these cars are definitely leaking.

01:19:49
Sophia
The existence of a man named Snake Oiler whose car does exactly what it sounds like his name implies it might do is, I think, maybe vindicating, your point?

01:19:58
Sam
It just doesn't seem very safe to put people under the track. And, you know, they probably paid more for those seats, like, for the danger of it just capitalism at work, guys.

01:20:09
Case
Yeah, it's a real splash zone.

01:20:11
Sam
Like a Gallagher show, but for gasoline.

01:20:15
Case
Yes. I think we should move on to pitches.

01:20:22
Sam
I do want to say really quickly sorry. I do think all the performances were very good. Sporting cast, everybody. Just want to throw that out there. There was a lot to talk about in this film that had nothing to do with cast, and that's why we are now breaking for pitches. But I will say that I actually enjoyed everyone's performance in this film.

01:20:42
Sophia
This is one of my favorite John Goodman performances of all time.

01:20:45
Case
Yeah, I'm actually surprised. I realized I had a note to say something about the cast, and we just kind of blew right through it.

01:20:51
Sam
There's just so much to talk about. And I also wasted a lot of our time talking about Squirtle's name. I almost call him squirtle. See, that's how bad his name is. Squirtle's name.

01:21:01
Case
Squirtle would be much better.

01:21:03
Sam
It would. It definitely would. So I apologize to listeners, but it is a very good cast. The movie does run too long, but I do recommend it. And now, Case, we can say, yeah.

01:21:16
Case
We'Ll segue over to pitches with the stealth that the nanjas should have had in this movie.

01:21:23
Sam
And then they were nanjas.

01:21:24
Sophia
They were.

01:21:25
Sam
That's why they didn't have stealth. Ninjas have stealth. Nanjas do not.

01:21:29
Case
Nanjas do. And hopefully we will not get body slander then thrown out of a window by John Goodman.

01:21:36
Sophia
Isn't that the dream?

01:21:38
Sam
That was awesome.

01:21:42
Case
Well, hopefully we can help him in body slamming and throwing nanjas out the window when we come back after this word from one of the other great shows on our network.

01:21:51
Sam
Hazard.

01:21:52
Case
Video games are a unique medium. They can tell stories, immerse us in. Strange, fantastic worlds blur the very boundaries of our reality. But at the end of the day, video games are fun, whatever fun is to you. I'm Jeff Moonan. And I am Matt, aka Stormageddon. And on Fun and Games, we talk about the history, trends, and community of video games. It's a celebration of all the games we play and all the fun we find within them. And there's so many more games out there, so we hope you'll share in that conversation with us. Fun and Games podcast with Matt and Jeff. Find us on certainpov.com or wherever you get your podcasts. And happy gaming. And we're back. All right, Sophia.

01:22:32
Case
So we have a couple of rules on the show, but we have one big rule on the show, which is that I am not allowed to go before Sam. The smaller rule is just like, it's got to be realistic. You can't propose that an actor who didn't start working until 2014 was in this movie, but the big one is I can't go before Sam. So you're our guest, which means that you can say, do you want to take the first swing wing, or would you prefer Sam to take the first swing? But either way, I'm just not allowed to go before Sam. So Sam can go first, then I can go, and then you can go, or whatever order. But you have the power.

01:23:06
Sophia
I feel so strong. It's like the true heart of racing is coursing through me. I'm one with my car. Sam, if you would like to kick us off, please go ahead.

01:23:14
Sam
Sure. So I actually don't have too much of a pitch for this because I actually really enjoyed this film. My main pitch is that it just needs to be tightened up. There's a lot of stuff in the middle that needs to be edited down, and I don't feel strongly either way on the ratings. I know both of you feel I feel like I'm the monkey in the middle here, the mew in the middle, if you will. And I feel that the core things that need to be broke down is that some of the stuff in the center that is a little preachy just needs to be tightened up. Those speeches need to be tightened up. It's not because the writing is bad. It's just that it's a little long winded.

01:24:00
Sam
Like, at a certain point, you have to throw out some of your babies so that the whole project survives. And a lot of it sounds like the Wachowskis are up on a soapbox, kind of like talking about purity. And I don't necessarily need think, you know, when we're with Royalton, we just need to kind of edit down, really remove a lot. Not all, but a lot. Like, maybe even just have them enter the building and then see them seeing the hook. And that's all I want to see of mew, even though I do love and I hate CHIMCHIM. D*** it. Why am I renaming things? I don't know. It's Sam. I'm Sam. I do. And like, I do love him even though I can't remember his name. So how much does love really mean for me? Big exponential question. I'll move on.

01:24:56
Sam
But I think that it's fine to have them sneak in and have them see the hook, but I think that has to be strategically placed. And I feel like because those moments didn't work as comedy, and then they just make that scene not work. Also, the scene with Christina Rishi and Speed where they're kind of being flirty, that was weird. Did not really work. Made me uncomfortable until the end. Just tighten it up, gets rid of some lines. And then I liked the ninja action. So I'm going to have to cut back on some of the actual races early on. I think our big Looney Tunes race is what I'm going to call it should stay intact, except add some quicksand for Sam.

01:25:45
Sam
And other than that, I think some of the races up top just need to be cut down just a little bit. Not the first race, but certainly, like some of the stuff in the middle just because too many cars, not fun for me. And I need the movie to be shorter in some places. I actually really like the moment where Speed and his brother speak, even though, of course, he doesn't know that Rex is I don't know how, but he doesn't know. And I feel like that needs to stay, but other than that, I'm up for anything kind of being. Also, I think Rain and his sister and stuff, all of those scenes need to stay intact because that's a very short like, all of their scenes are very short. But, yeah, that's basically what I do.

01:26:40
Sam
I would just try to bring down the runtime, because I think other than that, this movie is actually a lot of fun. I think it's got a lot of hijinks. And I think that the best part is probably the big race. I mean, if anything, make that come sooner by cutting down some of those soapbox rants and yeah, that's what I would do because I really liked this movie. I think it was good. It was fun. Just a little long. Like maybe too long. Fold laundry in the middle of it to get through to the end. The end is worth it, though. Okay, Sophia, now you get to decide. Do you want to go or do you want Case to go?

01:27:18
Sophia
Oh, more choices. Okay, here's another turn in the road. This is great. I'll go next. Get the thoughts out there. I would argue that this movie should have been pushed to a PG 13 rating and that they should have mostly changed the marketing strategy. I do agree with Sam that I think a lot of benefit could have been taken from another pass through in the edit. Take out some of the spider and CHIMCHIM bits that tend to go on for a bit, maybe trim down some of the dialogues so that we get to the good stuff, which is the races, which is, I think, where the style and the flair of the movie really shine the most. I wouldn't really change much besides that, other than the rating.

01:27:57
Sophia
I think that ultimately this movie could have been PG 13, and today, if it was released, it would have been. I would mostly focus on how you're marketing it because I think a big problem they had in making back their budget was people not going to see it because they weren't really sure what they were about to see. The trailer left a lot of ambiguity over who their target audience was, only further confused by the PG rating. Parents weren't sure if they should take their kids. Teens weren't sure if this was for them because it didn't look like a movie that was intended for them. So my ultimate argument is it's a pretty d*** good movie.

01:28:28
Sophia
Just trim it up a smidge, take out some of the elements that are kind of pandering to the PG audience and let it be a PG 13 fun blockbuster, more in the vein of a Fast and the Furious. And it might be colorful. You're probably still going to people who aren't into it, but at the same time you're going to be drawing in more people who might actually be able to appreciate it on the levels of what it's doing and on its silly, goofy, action filled bits.

01:28:56
Sophia
I think there's a lot of merit to letting this movie be intended for folks who might actually go to the movies and have a good time watching it and not have to worry about it being sanitized or whether or not their kids are going to be traumatized after seeing a man's finger get bit off by a piranha.

01:29:10
Case
Fair. Yeah. I think that we all agree that an editing pass is just the first thing that has to happen no matter what else occurs because it's just too meandering, which is not good on a racing movie.

01:29:26
Sam
Yeah. Absolutely not. Hashtag lepkoran is eat. Sorry.

01:29:32
Case
Yeah, like we said before, I think I agree in that teens weren't sure necessarily what this movie was going to be for them because it's based on a property that was a kids cartoon from the 60s. While it is remembered, it does not have the cultural cachet that some other things really do. From the standpoint of if you're trying to do like a PG 13 or a slightly more mature one, that can be cool. I think there's a lot of space for let's do a cool, grown up ish or at least slightly more mature ish version of whatever young person's property. And I think that there would have been a lot of fun for that. I agree. You could make it work. But then the problem is like, well, but it's coming out right after Iron Man and is it going to win?

01:30:23
Case
Then it's directly head to head in that scenario and it's a fight that we know it lost in the real world. So that's kind of like my back and forth on that one.

01:30:31
Sophia
Yeah, I mean, my answer to that would have been maybe change the release date as soon as you find out Iron Man is coming out right before it. But of course, who could have known at the time that Iron Man was run away success that it is? So I think a big push in marketing to try and sell this through the trailers and maybe fewer baby bottle drop promotional tie ins to be more of what it actually is and more of what we actually see. On screen as opposed to targeting an audience that ultimately didn't turn up for it would have worked to its benefit to at least make some of those box office numbers down. I don't really have a good argument for could it outcompete Iron Man? Because realistically, I don't think it could. Iron man has much wider audience appeal.

01:31:08
Sophia
But at the time, the MCU was not a thing. People did not know Iron Man was going to be a runaway success. So I see why they didn't necessarily change the release date. And you're not going to change your release date a week out from distribution. That is unfortunately the reality of movie distribution these days.

01:31:25
Case
This is just a moment of speculation, though. The movie that we got, if they had decided to go with a different big release date cycle like Thanksgiving weekend or run up to Christmas kind of era. I'm curious now, are racing movies inherently more summery kind of things? I'm not actually sure. None of us are really car people here.

01:31:48
Sam
None of us are like, what's the car season? When does Nap is that in the summer?

01:31:54
Sophia
Summer?

01:31:55
Sam
Maybe it is a summer thing. I don't know. I try not to watch too many things go in circles. Oh, I do like racing with people running like actual humans, not cars. But yeah, I guess they would think that it's like the racing season. But again, I think to Sophia's point, the people who watched the cartoon, the people who were involved in the property, their demographic is not children. So then the marketing to market it to children and I think this is like a general problem that we see a lot with films where they'll see bright colors and marketing departments will decide without having actually watched the film or understanding the content of the film, that film is actually for children.

01:32:45
Sam
Like our studio will decide, oh, no, this must be for kids because it was a cartoon and it's bright and it's colorful, but the people who watched it were watching it in the 60s. Those are not children. Anymore.

01:32:58
Sophia
I could have seen this maybe having a December because this came out in the summer and that's like your typical time release for a tent pole action blockbuster, which I don't think that this movie would have been a successful tentpole in any situation. I don't think it has enough mass appeal to pull that in. But like a December release where maybe parents who grew up watching the show could take their tween or teen kids to go see it with them, it's like family movie night. We're all home for the holidays. I think maybe you could have seen some success there because Sam, like, you're saying the people who have the nostalgia for this are not necessarily the target audience to then go watch this movie.

01:33:30
Sophia
But there's a way to get those to overlap by maybe changing the release date a little bit and switching strategies and how you're pushing the film that could have ultimately resulted in a better box office appeal or better box office ultimately. Income draw. Pull money.

01:33:45
Case
Yeah. Now I'm thinking like a July 4 would have been.

01:33:48
Sophia
Yeah, July 4 would have been it looked like fireworks.

01:33:51
Case
Yeah, it looks like fireworks. It's international, which I always enjoy subverting. The rah patriotism component of that. It is big and crazy. And even a PG 13 version would be somewhat family friendly for older kids, but a kind of thing where you could bring everyone and there's nothing automatically isolating everyone.

01:34:15
Sophia
I think there's no scenario where you want this to be rated R. You pretty much just want to slap a 13 next to the PG and then have the same movie come out.

01:34:22
Case
Yeah, I definitely think there's lays to it. For me, personally, getting into my I think that this is the lost opportunity for the Wachowskis to do, like an all ages movie. It's already almost there, but they're best known for doing The Matrix, which was an infamous R rated movie that was like, oh, it's bucking the trends of all the movies going to PG 13. I think that would have been combined with the bright colors and the fact that it's based on the property from the 60s that was, while itself actually more mature than people remember, perceived as a kid's property. But I think that would potentially open it up to larger audiences. If you were really trying to bring your kids to go see it, you would end up with extra sales because that would help make up the budget.

01:35:12
Case
But I think that the actual big issues with it is that it's so expensive and so long. And we agree. Cut that. Trim it up. There's too many scenes that are just like, oh, they just keep going. Like, all the races should be way shorter. We don't need to see all of any race except for the last one, which should just be the third act. Everything up to that point should be like, we saw a good chunk of it. And then we have wonderful mechanisms in this movie to cut to other points in time. They're all over the place. Like, we could have the entirety of Act Two be races overlapping exposition and dialogue scenes between people and just going back and forth between them.

01:35:48
Case
Because my big pitch for this movie is I think that we need to get into the racing aspect sooner. Which sounds crazy, I know, based on what this movie actually is because it's pretty fast that we get into it. And like I said, I would tone it down a little bit but I don't think it needs to be toned down that much. I think that the opening scene that we got with young Speed I think is too much investment for an audience that doesn't know what they're walking into. They try to be like, oh, no. It's not just going to be the crazy races. All the suburbia is also going to look like wild, is what they're trying to sell you on.

01:36:23
Case
But I think we need a slightly darker in color or not in tone a slightly darker scene at the very start to sort of ease people into the serial world that we're in for. And either that could be a race and not the race that we're dealing with the Racer X baggage because that's a lot of exposition to open up that I think, us seeing adult Speed or however you would describe Emile Hirsch Speed. I would like to have had a scene with him before were dealing with the whole Racer X baggage. And I realize it's the thing everyone remembers about Speed Racer.

01:37:02
Sophia
What, you mean that unbeknownst to Speed Racer X was his older brother Rex?

01:37:05
Case
Right, exactly.

01:37:07
Sophia
What? No, it's true.

01:37:09
Case
You don't see so either have it be a race or I would say move that first Racer X demonstration scene like the him chasing down the truck scene. Make that the first scene, like, open with this whole thing about Rain as this racer. We get the same mob scene. I think that works actually really well. And then all of a sudden, we have this cool vigilante thing and we set up this whole issue of all the racers are being bribed and you set up your initial drama which is the thing that they're trying to investigate and that you're trying to defeat by the end of the movie anyway. So just open with that.

01:37:43
Sam
Do we get to keep the piranhas?

01:37:46
Case
Yeah, I think you can. Because as long as you don't show the stump even when he has gauze on it, that's fine. Piranhas very big thing in kids cartoons.

01:37:56
Sam
I know. I just want to make sure that I don't know if I'd be on board if the piranhas don't get to be featured, but go on.

01:38:03
Case
Yeah. Stick your finger in it. I don't want to and then we never get a really good close up. Just don't show the bloody stump. Like, have him immediately cover it with a rag. And I don't think that's going to.

01:38:16
Sam
Like we don't actually see the bloody stump till later when Squirtle well, I'm going to call him Squirtle from now on because I like it better. Squirtle flicks it to hurt him in the fight between the two of them. So honestly, you never really see it.

01:38:29
Case
Yeah. So I don't think that those would be the things that really push us into too adult of a setting. And I realize sensors also change in terms of what's acceptable all the time. What used to be okay for PG 13 is now barely an R at this point because, weirdly, as much as we like to talk about the society becoming more degenerated, it's actually kind of the reverse in a lot of our standards of things.

01:38:56
Sophia
NPA rating gets more conservative with time, even though the ratings themselves are not changing in label. It's strange.

01:39:03
Case
Yeah. And that was a big thing, obviously, when new ratings were introduced, that was an issue I'm thinking about, like The Wild Bunch, for example, when it was resubmitted for rating and it was like, oh, it's an X. It's like, oh, okay, that's a problem. Or things like The Goonies, where it's like, okay, early PG 13 can get away with a lot more stuff. Yeah, I think there's a chance to get it down to G, and that just opens up more audience. And I think that as long as you're eased more into the lush world that we're in, I think it's okay. I don't think you need to change that much there, but like I said, it needs to get trimmed down like crazy. And I would love to see more of these crazy rosters of racers earlier on in the movie.

01:39:45
Case
It only really starts showing up in the later races. But we should have for one thing, if we're going to have lots of races throughout, we should have recurring people established early on. And maybe you don't go into all the corrupt ones or anything, and maybe only a few of them make it to the later races, but start that whole fighting game montages that they do towards the end of, like, look at our all right, so we got the Vikings over here. We got the pretty ladies over here. Lean into the Wacky Races part of it all. That's why we're here for Speed Racer and not for Fast and Furious. They're all in weird, goofy cars with strange themes and odd gimmicks that are kind of legal in this weird street racing scene or not street racing in this weird racing, Formula One racing.

01:40:34
Case
I don't know Speed into that. Give us this cast of characters that Speed is racing against and then reveal the corruption behind it all. The pageantry that he is playing a part in, that he unwittingly, is not skimming off the top the way everyone else is. And we start to realize that all these characters who are there with these weird gimmicks because they're being paid to do things in specific ways. I think that gets us hooked into the conflicts between some of the characters a little bit earlier. And again, I think you can trim it all down because we have wonderful devices to jump between scenes really quickly and not have it require tons of setup time and everything. So that's my big thought there, just opening scene and trim everything down.

01:41:24
Sam
Yeah, I can see that, too. I could even cut the whole first scene of him in to young no offense to Young Speed, because the actor was great.

01:41:40
Case
Nicholas Elliott.

01:41:40
Sophia
And then ariel winter is young, Trixie.

01:41:42
Case
Yeah, we haven't talked about that yet.

01:41:44
Sam
But they were both great. And it was really a cute scene, like, with his teacher and everything like that, and showing the obsession. And it was actually really lovely to see his relationship with his brother to kind of establish that. Which is the only reason why I didn't put in my initial cut, because I just feel like, oh, I liked that. That resonated with me, like their relationship. So that you get this feeling that Speed really loves him. But you can kind of do that with the race, too, where he's chasing the ghost. You can kind of get there. I'm not sure how much emotional payout it gives us to actually keep everything. At the very least, it should be trimmed down. Like we don't need everything that's in that scene.

01:42:33
Case
Yeah, all that flashback stuff at the opening, I think, could have been intercut later in the movie because I think that the racing the ghost of his brother is a way more effective introduction to the drama of that dynamic and that it's too much right beforehand. And him sitting on his lap. What is it? Don't steer, drive, or whatever the line was. I think that's so good. But that could have been later in the movie. And that could have been the scene when he's doing the race later on, like doing the race where his brother died. That would have been a really good moment there.

01:43:09
Sam
Although I'm not a driver, but is not a good idea to close your eyes when you drive. I am pretty sure that's true.

01:43:14
Sophia
He did win the race, though.

01:43:15
Sam
Well, how am I going to argue a speed racer? You're right. I don't drive. He does.

01:43:22
Case
Yeah, I think you could pepper it in throughout the movie and sort of like, just given this giant chunk of.

01:43:30
Sam
Wasabi right at the front, just ramming it down your throat and then using the whole middle for your manifesto. And then finally giving us some wonderful slapstick racing towards the third act.

01:43:45
Case
Yeah, because how much stronger would it be if in his darkest moments, after realizing that the whole sport is rigged. If you actually see why he loves it so much with his brother instead of opening the movie with it twice.

01:43:56
Sophia
Yeah, I do feel like it's a lot of redundancy between the first race scene and that opening flashback because the things we have to get from the opening flashback right. It's like speed likes racing. Trixie likes speed. Speed loves his brother. We get Speed loves his brother. And the immediate scene afterwards very effectively. And I think a much more dramatic time. Very easy toss in a little trick scene, speed youthful flashback literally anywhere else in the movie. They have so many scenes together that you could just do a little wipe, throw it in there, wipe right back to them repeating a line, maybe, or something similar to call back to it. Speed loves racing. Also very effectively established in that first race. So I think you're on something here with like, that is not the way to open this movie.

01:44:36
Sophia
Because I think that leans a lot on the nostalgia that isn't the target audience, especially if you're pitching, like, move it to G. Audiences are not going to have nostalgia for a cartoon that came out in the 60s in the way that this movie expects them to with the scene that it's selected to go first.

01:44:51
Sam
Yeah, I will miss the cartoon moment of mini Speed like driving and that kind of thing. The artwork behind him, I will miss that. But I don't think that's necessarily I.

01:45:01
Case
Don'T even think you have to lose it. I just think you put it in at a different spot. Because the other thing is that call him Squirtle.

01:45:10
Sam
Squirtle is his new name. I love it. Call him squirtle.

01:45:14
Case
Going from young Speed so quickly to then having Spritle, there was a half moment of like, wait, what happened there with the actors? Yeah, because it's such a like, oh, our family just does the same thing again and again because we are stuck in this cycle of mom and pop. Have a kid who becomes a great racer, and then they have a little brother who looks up to them. And then that first brother dies, other kid grows up, new brother.

01:45:39
Sam
I mean, Speed actually turns him and goes, you'll understand when it's your turn. That's what he says when he's about to leave. It's not even like, I'm going to die and you're going to do this too. It's kind of the feeling of that line.

01:45:52
Case
Yeah. So I just feel like that would help keep also clarity on, like, oh, no, this is the child that's in the movie that we're going to care about throughout the whole thing, as opposed to the young version of Speed Racer. And I realized that if you're really into the whole franchise, you probably didn't even think about it because sometimes you just know a thing, too. Like, perhaps the mysterious identity of Racer.

01:46:15
Sophia
X, who unbeknownst to Speed, is his older brother Rex.

01:46:18
Case
Yes, exactly. Because I also don't want to lose the way that Spritel is introduced because it's, like, fun watching the parents watching the race, and then it cuts down to them and it's like, I can't watch you watch. And he hands off the binoculars to Jim. Jim and I lost my s*** at that moment.

01:46:36
Sam
That was great.

01:46:38
Sophia
Yeah.

01:46:38
Sam
There are definitely scenes that work with them.

01:46:40
Sophia
Yeah.

01:46:41
Case
So I like all that. And I love our cast, and I like seeing Susan's Random as Mom Racer, both for when it's a little bit younger and then also a little bit later on. Those are good moments there. And John Goodman is great as Pops and having that family dynamic. I want to see some of that younger stuff, but I just don't need to see it all so much right up front. And I think you could have intercut it throughout to tell the story of why Speed cares so much about the purity of the sport.

01:47:08
Sophia
Yeah, I think that would be a solid edit to the film.

01:47:11
Case
So yeah. Regardless of if it's considered a PG 13 or a G movie or just stays a PG movie, because PG could have been fine. A lot of people are able to go see a PG movie. A lot of parents take their kids to see a PG movie. That all would have been fine. It's just it's so expensive and it's so long. And if it's a little bit shorter, even if it still costs as much, which they can put more screenings in, and if you get more butts in the seat, then it's good.

01:47:34
Sam
Yeah.

01:47:36
Case
Sometimes movies are caught down too much because they want to get more theater screenings, and then that hurts. It like Superman four. But this is one where god d***.

01:47:46
Sophia
It, the Wachowskis just the Wachowskis love their long movies.

01:47:50
Case
All of their movies.

01:47:51
Sam
Yeah. They've got a lot to say, and they have a very hard time editing themselves. And this is something that's consistent with them. I always think that what I love about them is they always are challenging themselves and their audience, and they're always trying for something different with every project that they do. And so it's always interesting to watch even when it's not good. Jupiter ascending is not good. It's not. But it was fun to watch. And there were elements that were amazing, and there were elements that I was at. Why? What are you doing? But it had a lot of things introduced and a lot of things that they wanted to put out there, but it was too much. And with this movie, again, this is actually more coherent than Jupiter Ascending by a mile.

01:48:44
Sam
But the problem is, again, they have a hard time kind of editing themselves and deciding they love so much of what they're doing that they try to keep all of it.

01:48:59
Sophia
They.

01:48:59
Sam
Try to protect all of it. It's to the detriment of the film because it doesn't flow as quickly or it's too long and it gets redundant. Yeah.

01:49:10
Case
And we see that time and time again. The matrix revolutions. Is that because they have so many babies that they love? Because my hot take has always been that Reloaded is a great movie that required a good follow up for people to look fondly on it, and that people just weren't sure what to make of it when it came out. And then the next one was bad, and so that as a result, they both became bad. But they had it reloaded. They had the video game entered The Matrix, they had the Animatrix. They had so much stuff going into it all, and they're like, how do we tie all this up in the third movie in our trilogy? And they couldn't stick the landing because they couldn't figure out which one thing to focus on. And so there's so f****** much stuff going on.

01:49:53
Case
And every project I look at after that has the same issue where they just have too many babies that they enjoy in this thing and they need to put them in the piranha tank.

01:50:03
Sam
Yeah. Just get those piranhas to live it out or dip it in some quicksand and then pull out. And whatever stays on the stick gets to stay in the movie. And that's the thing. Again, I actually really enjoy them as filmmakers. It is always kind of like a crapshoot. Is this going to be coherent? Is this going to be good?

01:50:29
Sophia
They're really all or nothing as filmmakers. It's either the best thing you've ever seen or I can't stand to watch.

01:50:36
Sam
But it's always going to be something. They're always going to have some sort of point of view. And whether or not they are able to capitalize or even give you any resolution on those points of view, that is up in question. But they're always going to say something.

01:50:57
Sophia
Yeah.

01:50:57
Sam
And I will give them that. They always have a point of view.

01:51:00
Sophia
I almost think with Speed Racer, its strength is that it was directed by the Wachowskis because of its look, its aesthetic, and how much it elevates the medium it's in. But also its weakness is that it's directed by the Wachowskis because it is trying very hard to say something for a PG, potentially g, potentially PG 13 movie where the focus really should be in this movie on, wow, these are some crazy stunts these cars are doing. Speed has a very standard arc that I don't think you really need to change too much.

01:51:28
Sam
Yeah.

01:51:29
Sophia
Crisis of faith about the thing you love, doubling down through the strength of your friends and your family ultimate victory. That's not too wild. And out there, you don't need a lot of legwork to make that understood. Royalton has a lot going on about capitalism. That's a very wachowski move.

01:51:44
Sam
Yeah.

01:51:45
Case
I will say, to their credit, it's one that fits better here than a lot of themes that they tend to opine about.

01:51:50
Sam
Agree.

01:51:51
Case
It works. It's too raw. Again, this movie needs another editing capacity and that could go all the way back to the screenplay. It just feels like very early drafts for at least the big ideas they want to deal with, and then they figured out how they want to shoot everything, and then we're like, oh, look at all this great stuff.

01:52:13
Sophia
Yeah.

01:52:14
Case
2 hours and ten minutes. Here you go.

01:52:15
Sam
Yeah.

01:52:17
Sophia
I imagine it's a movie that was difficult to edit as well because of the style that they chose, which I think is great. I think it makes it stand out from a lot of other blockbusters that came out of a similar era. But it is as an editor, looking at it, I'm like, that would be a nightmare to get any notes on. There are so many moving pieces and so many components going on screen at any given time that to cut a scene out requires a lot of finagling. It's not impossible, and they should have done it, but it is the kind of thing where I could see someone getting, like, a few weeks into the edit and being like, I don't know if I really want to trim this up too much.

01:52:47
Sophia
So hopefully they just don't have any notes and I won't give any editing notes on it.

01:52:51
Sam
Yeah, I could see that.

01:52:53
Case
Yeah, they spent a lot of money on those visuals and a lot of money on those editing scenes and whatnot those editors and then all of a sudden, I was like, wow, we spent a lot of money on stuff that we ultimately really should cut.

01:53:04
Sophia
Yeah, which is a problem. The phrase in the industry is kill your babies, kill your darlings. It's good advice. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much money you spend on something, if you want to make a return, you really do got to trim it up.

01:53:16
Case
Yeah. Now I'm wondering now I'm very directly wondering this, but I haven't seen anything reference it, but when this movie came out, this is right around the time we're seeing a lot of movies that had some big issues because of the Writer's Guild strike in 2007, and I'm wondering how much could have actually been changed. But it's written by the Wachowskis. The directors are always allowed to make rewrites as they so I don't know if this is even a possibility because it was written and directed by and that changes some of the rules there. But I do wonder if maybe they got the script to a place that they liked it and then they couldn't really update it, at least, like officially before at least they started working on some of the visual.

01:54:03
Case
That's the problem that happened with the second Bay transformers, where there were all these shots that they had to send to the editors for it to come out. But by the time they were able to make rewrites, they're like, well, we've already spent several million dollars on this shot with the testicles on the giant robot, and are we going to cut it? Well, yeah, we could, but we just spent a ton of money on it, so it's chasing bad money with good at a lot of spots. And I'm wondering if that happened here because again, the timing maps out, but it is written and directed by the Wachowskis, and the Writers Guild allows directors to do rewrites of their own.

01:54:36
Sam
Yeah, well, there were two other writers, though, also on this, because IMDb says it was Lily and two others that's like the official. So I don't know, maybe there was something there where if someone else touches the know, I don't know how the Writers Guild works.

01:54:57
Case
Well, and also there were lots of versions before this one ultimately was made. So it might be a scenario where.

01:55:02
Sam
There are legacy credits as I don't know. I don't know if that affects whether or not they could have edited like I'm not sure where yeah, at least.

01:55:11
Sophia
One of those writing credits is the creator of the original anime, which okay, that's not going to affect it too much about whether or not you can do rewrites. I'm not sure about the other the.

01:55:20
Sam
First one, yeah, it's hard to say.

01:55:22
Case
And like, Wikipedia lists just the Wachowskis as the writers and not to say that's more authentic than IMDb credible, but it is interesting to know if you're just saying written by it's the Wachowskis, and if you're doing all the screenplay credits, you get more names.

01:55:41
Sam
Right.

01:55:42
Case
So like I said, it could be that there's like residual scenes that they just the Writers Guild in terms of deciding who has ownership of a thing. Oftentimes when you're adapting properties, there's issues because they're adapting scenes that were already existing in previous material. So all those characters in an earlier person's draft are still going to be in this movie because it's still being based on Speed Racer.

01:56:03
Sophia
Right.

01:56:03
Case
So it might get kind of difficult there. Again, I have seen nothing that said that was part of the issue in the production of this movie. It's just interesting to realize that, oh, wait, that's exactly the time where it would have been an issue for the production of this movie. And our big issue is that, oh, well, they didn't do an editing pass to get it trimmed down enough so that all of a sudden they had this giant Bloated movie. And I'm not trying to be mean about it, but this big Bloated movie that they couldn't edit down because they'd already spent all this money on the special effects which happened to all the other movies that were made at that same time.

01:56:35
Sam
Yeah, that's true. Although we do have a pattern of them not editing down their work.

01:56:41
Case
Exactly.

01:56:42
Sam
I was like, These are kind of repeat offenders when it comes to that specific.

01:56:47
Sophia
It's sort of a case where there are definitely extenuating circumstances from the time it was released. But also, we do have a lot of works in these particular director writer combo category to indicate that maybe there was a little bit of their own style bleeding into it.

01:57:02
Case
Right.

01:57:03
Sam
Yeah. I love where your brain is going, because, honestly, I think if you haven't seen it and you're listening to this, I think you should check it out because I think it's pretty cool. I think it does some really experimental stuff, and I think that overall, the performances are really good. It's just kind of long, so you just have to carve out time in your life for it. But, yeah, it is too long. The biggest failing of this film is that it's too long. It needs to be cut down, and that's the only way you could fix it. This is actually a fine movie. It's fine.

01:57:53
Case
I wouldn't fully cut out any scene or anything like that. It's just everything just needs to be trimmed and maybe, like, solid.

01:57:59
Sam
Everything just needs to be tighter. Everything needs to be tighter. And someone needs to sit there with them and go, this is redundant. We don't need this here. Like, you said this five minutes ago, or like you say this better three scenes from now. So this little thing we can snip out because that's what's happening. I don't think making those changes would make the audience understand less what's happening. I just think it would keep them more engaged because they're not rehearing things.

01:58:32
Case
Yeah, it's definitely a fun movie. I fully agree. I think people should if they haven't watched it and have listened to our entire two hour ish episode.

01:58:44
Sam
Speaking of rants that need to be cut down, it might have been redundant. We're sorry.

01:58:49
Case
But fortunately we have an editor who we love. Matt, I love you.

01:58:53
Sam
I'm just going to say that in.

01:58:54
Case
The episode, this is not it.

01:58:57
Sam
We love Matt a lot. Yeah, me more than should be in the episode.

01:59:04
Case
Yes. Because an editor is important. And this movie could have really used a stronger editor.

01:59:10
Sam
Like Matt.

01:59:11
Case
Like Matt. But also, you know, there are lots of great editors in this world, like Sophia. So, Sophia, thank you for bringing this movie for us to talk about. It's always one that's been on my list of, like, I should watch that at some and, like, it's great to have reasons to do so. So I'm very glad that we watched it. I'm very glad we had a chance to talk about it and also kind of just enjoy it. I think we're all in agreement. It's a fun movie. Going into it. You should be prepared however you need to prepare.

01:59:40
Sam
Yeah, prepare with snacks. Use the bathroom already.

01:59:44
Case
Go into it prepared however you need to prepare, be it snacks, be it ready to take breaks throughout soothing music, be it some substances that make all the pretty colors work a little bit better, because sometimes that makes some of this better.

01:59:59
Sam
If you crochet, do your projects while you're watching this, give your hands something to do.

02:00:04
Case
But it's definitely a fun movie and I'm really glad that we had a chance to talk about it. So Sophia, thank you for coming on and thank you for bringing this. And where can people find you and follow you?

02:00:12
Sophia
Yeah, I mean, I'm always happy to pop up and talk about Speed Racer. It is one of my favorite movies as much as there are things that could be fixed about it. Honestly, like we've said a million times, it's just a fun watch. And if you know what you're in for, you're going to have a good time watching it. You can find my podcast moviestruck on all fine podcasting platforms by just searching moviestruck. All one word. I am on Twitter at Sophie k underscore. And that's K spelled K-A-Y. And that's pretty much it. I have a few other shows rolling with Difficulty and the Overly Sarcastic Podcast, which can also be found on all fine podcasting platforms and also those two on YouTube just by searching their names. But maybe Twitter still exists by now, so that's kind of my main thing.

02:00:55
Sophia
And if it doesn't, I have a portfolio website that is Sophiakricrichie.com. If you need editing work, whether you are wachowski or not, I'm available for hire. And also, I just love talking about movies. This has been an absolute delight. What a way to spend 2 hours. And thank you guys so much for having me on. This has been a blast. We've only talked about good movies so far. Between the Muppets and this, we're really knocking it out of the park, right?

02:01:22
Case
Well, the goal isn't just be like bad movies. This movie was a bomb. It's perfect for us to discuss how could it have sold better, right? A lot of fun. And so, again, thank you for coming on. Also, you mentioned them, but thank you to Overly Sarcastic Productions for introducing us, red specifically. But yeah, they're great.

02:01:40
Sophia
They're awesome. And I don't just say that because they employ me. They are actually very fun.

02:01:45
Case
Yeah, giving them a shout out feels like I'm pretty sure that the Venn diagram of who would actually listen to our show is probably a tiny little circle in their much bigger circle than their audience. But still, they do great stuff. And we're really glad that we had Red on the show and that Red introduced us because you're awesome to chat with. So all great people. And that's kind of what I love about podcasting, because you get to meet and chat with so many cool people and have great conversations like the ones that I get to have with you, Sam. Sam, where can people find you and follow you?

02:02:18
Sam
Well, I'm too busy for them to find me anywhere know, but here or occasionally when I remember our discord exists. Other than that, I am currently trying to stop CHIMCHIM from delivering a lot of CHIMCHIM cookies to people, and that is a full time job. So if you have any complaints about anything that I said, including renaming a character Squirtle or talking about sepia toned filmed movies, you can find Case at.

02:02:48
Case
Well, as long as it's still around, you can find me on Twitter at Case Aiken. And I'm sure that our audience is getting tired of hearing about it because at this point, they're probably aware of where the party is at. But at this time in December, we don't know.

02:03:02
Sophia
None of us know. It's a wild freaking west, guys.

02:03:05
Sam
Yeah. Every day there's something new. Not that I would know, because I'm busy with my friendship.

02:03:12
Case
Right. You have to dodge that monkey wrench. That is a very difficult part of your job, and you should be getting more hazard pay than you do.

02:03:19
Sam
Well, I'm actually training him how to use it more effectively for self defense.

02:03:27
Case
That's a double edged wrench right there.

02:03:29
Sam
Listen, he's innocent. Leave him alone, okay?

02:03:33
Case
But if Twitter is gone by this time, I have a hive set up, which is at Case Aiken, probably any other social media that people settle on, I'm going to end up using at Ksaken except for Instagram because I was foolish when I set it up. You can find me on Instagram at Ketzel Coatle Five because I'm a mythology nerd and also a legion of superheroes nerd. Hi. Yes, me. You know who I am.

02:03:55
Sam
They know by now.

02:03:56
Case
They know on the burning h*** site that is Twitter. You can find the show at another pass. But you know what? You should just go to Certainpov.com, where you can find more episodes of this show and tons of other great shows, such as recently added to our network Jukebox Vertigo, which is a really cool show where Keith and Jose talk. Through each episode, they bring a theme to build a Spotify playlist, and their guests all contribute songs. And then each week after the episode drops, they do a listening party on Twitch, and you can watch Jose, like, play Mario Kart or some other Mario Kart's. Perfect. Here Yay play Mario Kart, where they just jam out to the tracks.

02:04:38
Case
I was one of the episodes, and it was really fun just to then join them for the Twitch and listen to my picks of movie soundtrack songs while doing, like, crazy Mario Kart stuff. Because I brought some disco because I really like, everybody wants some. So that's a really cool show. It's finally set up on our website because it took me forever just to get my a** in gear and put that up. And at this point, it's been several months, so you can find it@certainpov.com, and there's lots of other great shows, but eventually we would like you to come back to this thread and listen to the next episode. Sam, what have we got up next?

02:05:11
Sam
Well, next time we'll be talking about Highlander Two The Quickening, but until then, if you enjoyed this, pass it on.

02:05:23
Case
Thanks for listening to certain point of.

02:05:25
Sophia
Views, another PassPass podcast.

02:05:28
Case
Don't miss an episode. Just subscribe and review the show on itunes. Just go to certainpov.com.

02:05:37
Sam
Another Pass is a certain POV production. Our hosts are Sam Alicea and Case Aiken. The show is edited by Matt Storm. Our logo and episode art is by Case Aiken. Our intro theme is by Vin Macri, and our outro theme is by Matt Brogan.

02:05:52
Case
I probably should have done this before we started recording, so I realized that because I listened to all my podcasts at 1.7 speed, that listening to your show all the time, when you say your name, it just is like I switched it to regular mode, which is super uncomfortable for me to realize now. I'm so used to super fast, so richard, Richard, Richardi. Sorry.

02:06:20
Sophia
No one has ever gotten it right.

02:06:24
Case
I went to go re listen, and I was like, so I say it right? And I was like, I don't know what those sounds I just heard were because it was too fast.

02:06:33
Sophia
I just sort of like, speed through it on the podcast, too. So it's like, no one's getting it. But there's a names that are escaping me. I looked at I have IMDb pulled up because I'm awful with actors. I, like, got faces down. And then immediately, Christina Ricci is in this movie.

02:06:50
Sam
And I was? Yes.

02:06:51
Sophia
Last name Synergy.

02:06:53
Sam
It's happening.

02:06:53
Case
Okay.

02:06:54
Sam
Yeah. Very similar.

02:06:55
Sophia
Yeah, just add more to it at the end. You got it.

02:06:58
Case
Now I'm wondering, is that a shortened version of her name?

02:07:01
Sophia
Maybe? Apparently, according to my older Italian relatives, richardi is a very common name in Italy. But I've never been and I've never met any other Richard's. So who knows?

02:07:11
Case
Maybe no, it might be shortened, but it was not shortened by her as, like, a stage name. I was curious about Cool, and it just needs to be good enough that Matt, when he's editing, is like, sliding everything around. It's like, oh, here Matt's.

02:07:27
Sam
Amazing, so I'm sure he's got it. We love you, Matt. Well, I love you. I don't know how Case feels. I'm not going to speak for him.

02:07:37
Case
They spoke at my wedding.

02:07:40
Sam
Yeah, so they spoke at your wedding. That means they love you. That doesn't mean I asked them to. So you ask them for labor. Okay. Does that really indicate love? I'm just saying enjoy a party and not have to think about the trauma of having to speak out loud. Starting this off right.

02:08:14
Case
Oh, yeah. CPOV, certain POV.Com.