Wacky Races is an American
animated television series produced by
Hanna-Barbera Productions.
[1] features 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies throughout
North America,
[2] with each driver hoping to win the title of the "World's Wackiest Racer."
The cartoon had a large number of regular characters, with 23 people and animals spread among the 11 race cars.
Wacky Races ran on
CBS from September 14, 1968, to January 4, 1969. 17 episodes were produced, with each episode featuring two different races.
Plot
The villain of the series drives a purple, rocket-powered car with an abundance of concealed weapons and the ability to fly.
Dick Dastardly is an archetypal mustache-twirling villain;
Muttley is his wheezily snickering dog henchman. Dastardly's usual race strategy revolves around using the Mean Machine's great speed to get ahead of the other racers, and then setting a trap to stop them and maintain the lead; but most of his plans backfire, causing him to fall back into last place. Dastardly never sees victory.
The other racers include
- The Slag Brothers, Rock and Gravel, in a cavemen-themed racer called The Boulder Mobile;
- The Gruesome Twosome, who are monsters in The Creepy Coupe;
- Professor Pat Pending, a scientist, in The Convert-a-Car;
- Red Max in a car/plane hybrid; called The Crimson Haybailer
- Penelope Pitstop, the lone female, in a 1930s racing costume in The Compact Pussycat;
- Sergeant Blast, and Private Meekly in an army tank/jeep hybrid with a small steamroller wheel attached to the front, called The Army Surplus Special;
- The Ant Hill Mob, gangsters, in The Bulletproof Bomb;
- Lazy Luke, a hillbilly, and Blubber Bear, in The Arkansas Chugabug;
- Peter Perfect, a gentlemanly racer, in The Turbo Terrific; and finally
- Rufus Ruffcut, a lumberjack, and his companion Sawtooth, a beaver, in The Buzzwagon.
Production
One of the unused plans for the series was that the races would be part of a live-action quiz show made by
Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions in which contestants would bet on which Wacky Racer would cross the finish line first. Although the game show concept was eventually scrapped, the series still retained a Hanna-Barbera/Heatter-Quigley dual production credit.
In 1988, a made-for-TV movie,
Around the World with the Wacky Racers, was planned as part of Hanna-Barbera's
Superstars 10 series of TV movies, but it never got past the concept stage.
Voice cast
- Paul Winchell – Dick Dastardly, Private Meekly, Clyde
- Don Messick – Muttley, Professor Pat Pending, Gravel Slag, Little Gruesome, Ring-a-Ding, Sawtooth
- Daws Butler – Rock Slag, Big Gruesome, Red Max, Sergeant Blast, Peter Perfect, Rufus Ruffcut
- John Stephenson – Luke, Blubber Bear
- Janet Waldo – Penelope Pitstop
- Dave Willock – Narrator
Spin-offs and similar series
Penelope Pitstop and the Ant Hill Mob were spun off into another cartoon series in 1969 titled
The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. In the same year, Dick Dastardly and Muttley were given a spin-off series titled
Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. The series is sometimes mistakenly known as
Stop the Pigeon, after the show's working title and theme song. Both series ran for two seasons.
In 2006, the pilot for a spin-off series titled
Wacky Races Forever was produced for
Cartoon Network.
[4] The series depicted a roster of both new and returning racers competing against each other. Penelope Pitstop and Peter Perfect had married and created Perfect Industries, the corporate sponsor of the new Wacky Races, whereas their children Parker and Piper competed in the race. Other characters included the Slag Brothers, Professor Pat Pending, a teenage version of the Gruesome Twosome, and Dick Dastardly and Muttley (working for a new villain named Mr. Viceroy, who sought to steal Perfect Industries). The series was not picked up by Cartoon Network for the reasons that the traditional humor the pilot had was not what newer generation of kids want.
In 2016,
DC Comics launched a comic series called
Wacky Raceland. It is a dark and gritty re-imagining of the series set after the apocalypse in a similar vein to the
Mad Maxfranchise. The comic ran for six issues from May to December 2016.
A
reboot - also produced by Hanna-Barbera - was released on
Boomerang's
SVOD service in 2017. It also aired on the Boomerang channel in June 2017.
