hi, big speed racer fan, in your speed racer post you mentioned that you have proof that the movie is set in 1991 ? please say more about that.
oh I can absolutely do that! best movie of all time! let me explain my logic
so Speed, Pops, and Royalton all talk a lot about the '43 Grand Prix. watching the recording of that race inspired Pops and Speed to get back into racing after Rex's death, but this was also the race that inspired Royalton to get into racing in an evil, stock-market-manipulation kind of way.
everyone in the film calls it "the '43 Prix", including in the script (because I checked, because I wanted to be sure about this, DM me if you want more script stuff btw it's so good):
the important part here is that everyone calls it "the '43 Prix" and not "the 43rd Prix" - we know for sure that this race took place in 1943.
but fun fact! it was, also, the 43rd Prix! we know this because of the poster on Speed's wonderful, beautiful orange wall.
Rex's poster of Ben Burns (which Speed kept), says "Grand Prix Winner XLIII", and you might think that would mean the year and not the race number, but
when Horuko gives Speed the invitation to the Grand Prix, he calls it the 91st annual Grand Prix and the invitation says XCI, meaning that the WRL uses roman numerals to indicate the race number and not the year.
not that it matters, because it seems like in this universe, the race numbers and the year numbers match up! the 43rd race was in 1943, and so this, the 91st race, must be in or very near 1991!
that's my main argument here. but also, we need to look at Ben Burns
and I mean like, literally, we need to look at him.
he's not very young here, right? this was a flashback shot of his Grand Prix win against Stickelton, and he doesn't look like a teenager or anything; he's definitely a grown man.
but now look at present-day Ben Burns:
he's still pretty young! Richard Roundtree was 66 when he played Burns, and the character can't have been too much older than that.
so if we're very generous and say that Burns was 20-22 when he won against Stickelton in 1943, and that he's 68-70 in the present day, our year of 1991 makes sense here too!
so that's why the absolute masterpiece Speed Racer (2008) takes place in 1991, thank you for coming to my ted talk
this argument falls apart if you, instead, decide that the film takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, and the '43 Prix was actually in 2043 or even 3043. they never actually say it was 1943, so there's still some room for fun alternate interpretations here.
there is an out-of-universe explanation for the race number btw! the 91st Indy 500 took place in 2007 while the movie was being made, so the Wachowskis probably picked the number 91 because of that.
also this is a complete tangent, but while looking up Richard Roundtree's age (may he rest in peace), I looked at some photos from when he was young and? I think I accidentally found the one they used to make that winning flashback photo?
this one's on his IMDB as "Richard Rountree [sic] at home, c. 1972" and if you mirror it, and rotate it a bit...
yeah. I mean, they definitely changed some things, but his eyes are the same, and the general emotion of his face.
wild thing to discover by accident, but hey, I guess this is a thing I know now!
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