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.
