Television Speed Racer: someone please explain the appeal of this show to me.

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

I didn't get it then, and I sure as hell don't get it now.

When I was a teenager in the 90s, the music video was a medium in its heyday, and MTV was just starting to feel its oats as the creator, not just the purveyor, of cool. The channel was only starting down its slippery slope of airing shows that had nothing to do with music, and by and large a lot of these at the time were not too bad. Liquid Television was a gem. Aeon Flux was not my cup of joe, but its appeal was no mystery to me, and it visually incredible. When MTV picked up Ren and Stimpy, I immediately thought to myself, Yes, this is where this show always belonged in the first place. "Edgy", and in the case of animation, "weird", was definitely the aesthetic they were going for. They had their audience targeted. (Still do somewhat, I hear.)

But I never understood their selection of Speed Racer. I gave it a chance, but was only ever able to force myself to sit through 2 or 3 episodes. The show's very presence on MTV always gave me a feeling of "The emperor has no clothes". All I saw were thin, stupid plots, low budget Japanese animation in gaudy colors, cardboard characters, and an awkward foreign feeling that made me wonder if something huge was lost in the dubbing or translation. Did a lot of people find it unintentionally funny, like Star Trek?

Was this an early example of hipster irony, "so bad it's good"? I may be worldly but I've never been hip, and I don't think I have it in me to get tickled about a campy or kitschy cult classic. In any case, the reemergence of Speed Racer as a graffito and T-shirt design (Che Guevarra's replacement?) is unmistakably retro-chic. But what fond memories from childhood are the man-children in fedoras referencing, exactly? These kinds of throwbacks typically reference pop culture items that were salient and taken seriously the first time around. I don't see how anyone could have taken Speed Racer seriously on this side of the Pacific, and the storylines were pretty insipid and forgettable, even through a child's eyes.

Was Speed Racer MTV's attempt to reach a very different demographic from me? Seems unlikely, given that the rest of the channel was aimed at suburban American teen boys, and that's exactly what I was when I watched it.

I would really like to hear a sincere and long-time fan of this show explain its finer points to my heathen mind. Dispel my lingering hunch that MTV aired this show as nothing more than a demonstration of their ability to make absolutely anything cool.

 

[psood0nym]

I have to imagine that your suspicion that "Speed Racer's" airing was an early example of hipster irony is largely correct. That, and the fact that presumably MTV could purchase the rights to it for next to nothing are the only major reasons I can see for its broadcast. I, too, was flabbergasted in considering what motivation the network could have for showing me it at the time. In considering it now because of your thread, I think MTV might have been making an appeal to the self-styled or wannabe pop culture dilettante of the era, in that "Speed Racer" strikes me as probably embodying, as well as making a mockery of, early manga/anime tropes. Thus, it offered such a person the semblance of cred, and behooved them to watch such tripe (same as now).

Despite this, I do miss "Liquid Television" era MTV. I was a child at the time who couldn't fully appreciate it but the feeling of it made its significance obvious. I've recently checked out some YouTube videos from the show and it's still pretty rad.