Giant-Size Wacky Races #1 // Review
Back in the late 1960s, the animation studio Hanna-Barbera had collaborated with a tV game show producer to develop a sort of a game show-style cartoon in which cartoon characters raced each other and kids watching along at home could guess who would win the race. Wacky Races ran a whopping 17 episodes from 1968 to 1969. It’s a strange piece of trivia from the company that also produced such mega-pop cultural machines as Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones and the Jetsons and so on. Decades after it’s been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn’t a baby boomer or really, REALLY into the history of animated kids TV shows...Dynamite Comics presents a one-shot adaptation of the series written by Ivan Cohen with artist Mariano Benitez Chapo and colorist Nick Caponi.
Penelope Pitstop is in a dangerous neck-and-neck race with the sinister Dick Dastardly in Torrey Desert in Utah. He’s not a particularly good driver, but his sponsor car is extremely. tricked-out and they ARE in the middle of nowhere. Anything could happen. And so naturally there’s going to be some kind of sinister action taken. Penelope is going to end-up in a crash. It’s a crash that lands her in the hospital. One might expect that she could relax and rest while she recovers, but she IS a major celebrity and people are going to find out what’s going on.
Cohen takes the chassis of a silly, little short-lived animated series and lowers the massive engine of a serious drama under the hood of the thing. The lighthearted elements of the kids’ cartoon are still intact in places. (There’s even a cameo appearance by Dastardly’s sidekick Muttley.) It feels a bit strange trying to take it seriously on any level, though. That’s not to say that the adaptation isn’t a little bit fun, but there seems to be some conflict between the weird cast of characters and the serious complexity of the story. It’s a fun mash-up but it feels a bit at odds with itself.
Chapo and Caponi capture the intensity of a ridiculously over-the-top race with some splashy chase action. The fact that it’s a “giant-sized” issue aids in this. The art team has the opportunity to occasionally pound the page with a big spread that explodes off the page. It can work quite well in places, but it can also feel more than a little weird. The cartoonishly strange race cars inspired by the goofy 1960s cel animates series feel particularly bizarre as they are given the kind of impact that a serious race car might have. So the art is just as weird a mash-up as the script.
It’s a fun exercise to put something like this into comic book format. It’s not like there’s a huge cult following for this sort of thing. The most notable thing about the series is the fact that it established Dick Dastardly and Muttley, who showed-up in cartoons since then...but not really all that much in recent years.
