Hanna-Barbera’s riotous road rally from 1968, Wacky Races gets the high-definition treatment it deserves. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if The Great Race took a sugar rush, drove off a cliff, bounced twice, and kept going with cartoon physics and a maniacal dog laughing in the passenger seat—this is it.
Inspired by Blake Edwards’ 1965 live-action film The Great Race (and it shows), Wacky Races gleefully throws realism out the window, straps dynamite to its bumper, and lets chaos take the wheel.
Like The Great Race, which pitted Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, and Jack Lemmon against each other in a globe-trotting competition full of slapstick, sabotage, and sartorial flair, Wacky Races delivers a similarly madcap energy—only here, the racers are animated, the stakes are nonexistent, and the mustaches are somehow even more villainous.
The series, which originally aired from September 1968 to January 1969, packs 17 episodes and 34 separate races into a whirlwind tour of North America.
Each episode is a double-header of harebrained hijinks as eleven eccentric vehicles and their even more eccentric drivers compete for the dubious honor of being the “World’s Wackiest Racer.” There’s no character development, no grand story arc—just a loop of race, sabotage, explosion, and defeat, all narrated with the gleeful tone of a sportscaster who may or may not have lost a bet.
At the center of it all are Dick Dastardly and his wheezing sidekick Muttley, a duo so iconic they make Jack Lemmon’s Professor Fate look like an amateur. Dastardly is a mustachioed melodrama machine, constantly deploying elaborate traps—fake detours, falling anvils, spring-loaded everything—that inevitably backfire, leaving him in the dust and his dog snickering. Muttley’s laugh alone could power the Mean Machine for three laps.
The rest of the cast could’ve come from a Hanna-Barbera fever dream: Penelope Pitstop, the Southern belle with a pink car that doubles as a mobile salon; Peter Perfect, her chiseled admirer whose car breaks down almost as often as he does; and the Slag Brothers, a pair of prehistoric lunks who club their stone-age car into motion. Then there’s the pint-sized Ant Hill Mob in a gangster jalopy, hillbilly Luke and his neurotic bear Blubber, and a host of others who feel like leftovers from rejected Flintstones pitches—and that’s a compliment.
The real treat here, though, is the voice cast. Paul Winchell chews the animated scenery as Dastardly, while Don Messick’s Muttley steals every scene with a laugh and a grumble. Daws Butler, Janet Waldo, and John Stephenson round out a dream team of voice legends, each bringing flair to these thinly sketched but endlessly amusing characters. Their performances give the show its timeless charm, even when the animation is clearly on a budget (look closely and you’ll start to notice the same rock formations zip by like a Hanna-Barbera Groundhog Day).
Remastered from 4K scans of the original camera negativeaxcxxxxcxccxring back to life. Between the upgraded visuals, classic voice work, and a premise that gleefully riffs on The Great Race and then veers off a cliff (in the best way), this one’s a must-own for members of Generation X who grew up listening to the snickering laugh of canine Muttley
