![speed racer 2008 show speed racer 2008 show](https://production.listennotes.com/podcasts/eye-of-the-duck/speed-racer-2008-with-5BrdbHePDg3-5T_4BNx-ZJD.1400x1400.jpg)
The carefree world of Pixar’s Cars looks like a Detroit-sponsored dystopia by comparison. Speed Racer’s futuristic world (its exact timeframe is unclear, but the dates affixed to various events in racing’s past place it in a sort of alternate future-past reality) has been effectively denuded of the propagandistic power of your average automobile-based movie. Or cars that either are or resemble real-world vehicles, giving their manufacturers the advertising power of product placement. Or exhaust pipes and the plumes of smoke that go with them. At varying points, the film depicts a futuristic city in which airborne vehicles soar between Day-Glo skyscrapers a cross-country race that rockets from an underground catacomb to a sprawling desert to a treacherous ice cavern and a boy and his pet chimpanzee getting hopped up on candy and riding a cart through a swarm of factory employees on Segways, while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” blasts in the background.
![speed racer 2008 show speed racer 2008 show](https://c.theost.com/x/2/1338f7a69.jpg)
From the start, shifting timelines flow in and out of one another, juxtaposing the high-speed auto racing that is the title character’s forte with flashbacks to his troubled childhood and Greek-chorus commentary from a slew of racing announcers in a panoply of languages. Where the former was dour and the latter was merely workmanlike, Speed Racer feels like an explosion in a Skittles factory, edited to feel like a dream. Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s 2008 follow-up to The Matrix trilogy feels like an anticipatory antidote to a decade-plus of same-y superhero blockbusters kicked off by two of that year’s other major releases, The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown.
#SPEED RACER 2008 SHOW SERIES#
What does the future hold? In our new series “Imagining the Next Future,” Polygon explores the new era of science fiction - in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond - to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty.