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NEWS: New 2-Minute Live-Action Speed Racer Trailer Posted

For a certain generation of American kids, "Speed Racer" was our introduction to the lo-fi animated form now known as "anime." At the time, we just thought it was cheapo Japanese animation: flat, static, dubbed into badly translated English and barely "animated" at all, given that the frame only seemed to change approximately two times per second and the "moving" backgrounds were made up of about four cyclically repeating drawings instead of the eight or so we were used to seeing in Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The faster Speed went, the slower the sequence of backgrounds. Wow.

To us, this show was just filler between after-school reruns of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Munsters." We watched it because it was on, and it was in color.

Now the Wachowski brothers (of the "Matrix" movies) have spent $100 million on a mixture of photography and digital animation and called it "Speed Racer." They have captured (almost) all the chintziness, inexpressiveness and incoherence of the TV show in two hours and nine minutes, or about two hours too long, give or take. Yet some of us would just rather re-rent "Tron" (1982), which was not only a more immersive, dimensional and original take on the Commodore 64 video-graphics aesthetic, but also funnier and more exciting.