Franchising and Failure: Discourses of Failure within the Japanese-American Speed Racer Franchise

Two texts are commonly cited by those recounting anime’s early transnational history in the United States: Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (1963–66, Tetsuwan Atomu) and Tatsuo Yoshida’s Speed Racer (1967–68, Mahha go go go). ¹ However, where Astro Boy has been studied in some depth by academics, as a Tezuka creation and as the first anime to cross over to U.S. television, Speed Racer has received scant attention. ² Speed Racer’s relative academic invisibility is contrasted by its recent renewal as a multimedia franchise. Starting in the 1990s, with the formation of Speed Racer Enterprises by John and Jim Rocknowski, Speed Racer has been rerun (initially on MTV), has been adapted multiple times for television and the cinema, and has been made available through a wide range of merchandise. ³ The franchise has also been augmented in Japan by its original creators, Tatsunoko Production Co., whose Mach Project Production Committee was created in 2003 to exploit the earliest incarnations of Speed Racer, especially the television anime Mahha go go go. ⁴ As these separate national approaches to Speed Racer’s continuing production suggest, the franchise is not a straightforwardly “Japanese” manga or anime property. This article examines the recent live-action Speed Racer film in order to investigate perceptions of its origins, as the franchise continues to be reproduced and repackaged across decades, continents, and cultures.

Beginning life as a moderate hit on Japanese television, Mahha go go go was only the second anime television series created by Tatsunoko Production Co. From its inception, Mahha go go go had transnational roots. Ippei Kuri (cocreator Toyoharu Yoshida’s pen name) has stated that the series “was based strictly on our all-out adoration of America.”⁵ The Japanese version follows the adventures of race car driver Mifune Gō, whose family, girlfriend, and chimpanzee travel around the globe racing on futuristic tracks. The show was adapted for the American market by Peter Fernandez, who translated and redubbed Mahha go go go as Speed Racer for the Trans-Lux Television Corporation.⁶ As with many of its anime contemporaries, therefore, the early transnational history of Mahha go go go was one of wholesale cultural reinterpretation and origin erasure.⁷

Like those earlier television productions, the Speed Racer (2008, dir. Lana and Andy Wachowski) film also has a transnational ethos at its heart: from the hybridized national locations invented for its diegesis; to the nationally specific car racing crews depicted within the film; to the mixture of European, Asian, and American stars who play its characters; to its partial European funding and production at Studio Babelsberg in Germany.⁸ In these ways, the 2008 Speed Racer film heightens discourses about the places and origins of the Speed Racer franchise. The film also takes Speed Racer from cel animation into a new mixture of live action and CGI-effects filmmaking, making it a challenging example of remediation. Using Julian Stringer’s approach to adaptation, which examines the discourses around adaptation in order to investigate how meanings are negotiated at specific historical-textual junctures, this article examines the industrial and reception discourses around the release of the Speed Racer film.⁹ Through this analysis of American popular and industry reportage, it becomes possible to gauge how Speed Racer failed at the box office and what roles its transnational anime roots played in this failed experiment in blockbuster filmmaking.

Focusing on an unsuccessful adaptation also provides a rare opportunity to test the limits of manga and anime’s global success. Its growing global profile over the last two to three decades has been noted. Henry Jenkins, for example, specifically cites anime and manga within his discussions of transnational pop cosmopolitanisms, and anime features strongly in Koichi Iwabuchi’s contention that globalization should be conceptualized as a multidimensional process illustrated by Japanese media’s spread to the rest of the world.¹⁰ These challenges to American pop-cultural dominance offer useful correctives to discussions of popular culture, but the risk is in overstating manga and anime’s global popularity and...