Speed Racer: Re-badging an Icon


Growing up in Flyover Country, my experience of the broadcast T.V. medium was perhaps more limited than it might've been had I grown up on either the East or West Coast, particularly with respect to what advertising dollars could be generated in our marketplace, and what they could buy.

As I recall, Saturday Morning TV in the 1970s was dominated by now-classic animated productions from UPI, Jay Ward, and Hanna-Barbera; Unless I'm mistaken, kids in Minnesota didn't see Speed Racer until the UHF heyday of the early 1980s (@ Tohoscope and @ Bomb, y'all might recall the late 1960s and what I'm forgetting of the early 1970s ; )

Why I'm interested in this at present is due to the various DVD collections and boxsets of the original television series that have been released in the past 10 years or so; Are there any that have the original Trans-Lux OP and ED titles? I'm no purist but I am pretty freakin' nostalgic, and I understand how titles and rights and licenses have lapsed and been re-claimed and Lawyered ad nauseum. I'm thinking I might have to track down old commercial VHS releases; I collected the NOW Comics imprint for a while, but lost interest when the various animated (Cel Animated and otherwise) began rolling-out in the late 1990s.

Also, fwiw I've never been a fan of the new logo...

(Edited image courtesy of Mike Markowski)

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Talk to Toole. I remember he posted something about the Trans Lux openings back when the movie came out.

Yeah, I prefer those Trans Lux ops to the crappy ones they have on the DVDs...