Car Toons Week Day 3: A Day At The Races

The Wacky Races that is!

Based loosely on (or a blatant ripoff of, depending on your POV) the 1965 movie The Great Race, The Wacky Races pit Hanna Barbera characters new and old against one another in animated automotive mayhem!

The villainous Mean Machine was driven by Dick Dastardly and his giggly pal Muttley.

As you can see it is very close to the cartoon. I love Muttley, and no matter how hard I try to imitate his laugh, in all these years it still ends with a coughing fit.



I only wish these cars had tiny cartoon drivers.

"Muttley, you fool!"

Next up is Penelope Pitstop's Compact Pussycat.

Another amazingly accurate casting, all the way down (or up) to the bow-topped parasol.

"Hayulp! Hayulp!"



Like the Flintstones' Sports Car from yesterday, each of these are 1:64 scale Johnny Lightning releases from 1998, and each one is a beautiful representation of it's cartoon counterpart.

Sadly Johnny Lightning only produced two of the race cars from the Wacky Races cartoon. They did however release at least two more Hanna Barbera themed cartoon cars (the final one will show up later this week.)

The coolest one of all, in my opinion, being Speed Buggy!

I never would have expected to see an accurate Speed Buggy toy, especially so far from the series' release. I guess I'm not the only one with a fondness for the old motor head.


Voiced by the incomparable Mel Blanc, Speed Buggy was pretty much just Scooby Doo on wheels.

Speed Buggy was a living car who drove around with a group of teenagers (all of which were also based on the Mystery Inc. formula...which in turn was based on characters from The Many Loves of Doby Gillis.)

"putterputter vroom vroom pfffffffppppptttttttt!"

"putterputter hey babe putterputter goin' my way? putterVROOMputter"





And here they are all together. Amazingly, in my quest for cartoon images on Google, I discovered that there are actually real Wacky Race vehicles running around out there in the world! How cool is that?




Watch out Penelope, I wouldn't be surprised if Dastardly dropped an oil slick on that straightaway!