Momento nostalgia. Quem não lembra desse desenho animado? Corrida maluca?

Wacky Races is an animated television series produced by Hanna-Barbera. The series features 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies throughout North America, with each driver hoping to win the title of the "World's Wackiest Racer." Wacky Races ran on CBS from September 14, 1968, to January 4, 1969. Seventeen episodes were produced, with each episode featuring two different races.

The cartoon was unusual in the large number of regular characters, twenty-four in total: the twenty-three people and animals spread among the 11 race cars, plus the unseen (and never identified) race announcer. Reruns of the series currently air several times a day on Cartoon Network's classic animation network Boomerang.

Background

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. It is one of the few Heatter-Quigley series not currently owned by successor company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio where the Hanna-Barbera team got its start. 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.

Characters and vehicles

Dick Dastardly and Muttley in the Mean Machine 00 (The double 'O'/ The Double Zero)

The antagonists of the series, in a purple, rocket-powered car with an abundance of concealed weapons and the ability to fly. Dastardly (voiced by Paul Winchell, in a manner that Winchell would use several years later to portray the Smurfs' nemesis Gargamel) is an archetypal mustache-twirling villain; Muttley (voiced by Don Messick) is his wheezily snickering, anthropomorphic dog henchman. Dastardly concocts plans and traps in order to maintain a lead, but most of his plans backfire, causing him to finish in last place. Because of this, Dastardly has never won a Wacky Race or even officially finished in the top three. In fact, he has only crossed the line five times: thrice in last place, once in fifth place (beating the Surplus Special) and even once in first place (but in the replay was "disqualified for stretching a point"). He is often foiled by the finishing line itself, where he makes a sprint at the end to gain the lead but whilst sneering and looking behind him at the other competitors fails to notice that parts protruding from the mean machine (often sails or rockets) are too big to get under the finish banner and he subsequently crashes into it. Dick Dastardly and Muttley would also appear in Fender Bender 500, racing against characters like Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw. In this series they were actually able to pull off a win.

The Mean Machine appears to have been by far the fastest vehicle, providing Dastardly with a theoretically unbeatable advantage. But in every episode, after blazing far ahead of the others, Dastardly would stop to set up various booby traps for the other racers and this would eventually cost him the race. It never seems to occur to him to race fairly even though he would presumably triumph every time.

More:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacky_Races

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