I've been watching Speed Racer since I was five, but it wasn't until recently that I understood how much the American version of this cartoon depended on the work of a single producer, Peter Fernandez. He's pictured above in the first two jpegs below Speed's picture.
Fernandez was a voice actor and producer in the mid 1960s. He was picked to translate a Japanese cartoon into one American audiences would watch. He received the fifty episodes, all filmed in Japanese, short, English summaries of each episode's story, and that was it. He had to watch each episode in detail (the summaries were quite vague), write American dialogue that not only expressed the story, but also was more or less in synch with the characters' lip movements (which is why some of the dialogue for that show seems awkward, as there was very little technology to assist this process at the time). He voiced several characters himself (including that of Speed Racer). Of course he could not voice all of the characters, so he recruited a female voice actor (Corinne Orr) and another male voice actor (Jack Curtis) to play the others. Orr and Curtis are pictured above, just below Fernandez's pictures. After recording the dialogue (and rearranging and rewording the theme song), the cartoon debuted in 1967.
The "M" on the Mach 5's hood stood for "Mifune" motors, as that was the name of Pops' car company in the Japanese version. The "G" on Speed's shirt stood for "Go," since his name in Japan was "Go," and the show was named Go Mifune!. This was intended as a homage to the Japanese dramatic actor Toshiro Mifune (star of The Seven Samurai, among others).
One aspect of the show I find particularly entertaining is in the names Fernandez chose for the villains. Just below Curtis' picture is "Snake Oiler," the star of the Car Acrobatic Team, and below his picture is "Skull Duggery." The names were clever and hokey in a way that has been largely lost to history because idioms like 'snake oil' and 'skullduggery' are seldom used now.
I'm nearly 60 and when I think about the show it astounds me how perfect it was for little kids and their naive imaginations. The "Car Acrobatic team?" Oh yeah, you can pile a half dozen one ton cars on top of a single car and it'll run...no problem! (see above). Sure, a one ton car can jump across a chasm or 8 feet in the air and land with no damage! (see above again) Cars can run underwater like a submarine! Easy! You have a great race car? Just like in NASCAR it has a bullet proof windshield, saws that slice through grown trees, a homing robot, and again it can jump around like it's on a pogo stick!
But seriously, in the minds of 5 year olds, this all makes perfect sense. My Hot Wheels could ALL fly back in 1971.
This is a hoot also, the introduction of Go Mifune!:
Anyway, I think I have a lot more to say about Speed Racer and his ilk. I gotta take Wifey to a baby shower. More later.