Warner Bros., I’m Begging You To Release My Beloved 2008 Cult Favorite on 4K
There is no film in the 21st century that lives more up to the title of “cult classic” than Speed Racer. A notorious box office bomb, savaged and thrown away by critics, it was seen as an incomprehensible folly that damaged the Wachowski Sisters’ reputations as their follow-up to the anticlimactic conclusion of their Matrix trilogy. But as time has sped on, it’s become clear that it has a far greater shelf life than anybody could have anticipated.
It was both ahead of the curve and light years beyond what any other current blockbuster is doing in imagining what can be done with special effects. The notion that Warner Bros. doesn’t want to preserve this film for future generations is an egregious mistake that would lose them so much goodwill from the chronically online cinephile community that has ensured that Speed Racer is now a beloved film.
Warner Bros. Doesn’t See the Fanbase… Somehow
In anticipation of an upcoming event honoring her at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Lilly Wachowski told Collider that she had no idea what was going on with the rumored 4K update of Speed Racer. She looked into it and found that “they don’t see the fan base that’s out there for something like that, which is unfortunate.” She did acknowledge the reasonable likelihood that it’s not a huge priority for WB in the current age, considering the huge turmoil and flagrant capitalist greed that has consumed the studio under David Zaslav‘s regime.
I find it hard to believe that this WB wouldn’t be able to notice and work to please a rabid online fanbase. Isn’t this the same studio that blessed the bloodthirsty Zack Snyder fans with his director’s cut of Justice League? The same studio that greenlit a total dud like The Alto Knights because Zaslav owed producer Irwin Winkler a favor? It feels like the only reason WB can’t be bothered to do anything with Speed Racer is that they can’t find a way to capitalize on it beyond the immediate 4K sales, or that they’re convinced that nobody cares about the legacy of the Wachowski Sisters enough to shell out money for one of their projects. This is particularly strange, since it stands in direct contrast to one of the better aspects of WB as a studio.
Warner Bros. Can Do Preservation Well
Despite the rampant disrespect that WB has thrown towards other properties, like burying Batgirl for a tax cut and removing a majority of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons from Max, they’re ironically one of the better studios when it comes to film preservation. They’ve demonstrated multiple well-appreciated avenues to ensuring that their older films remain in circulation for anybody interested in their history.
They have an entire playlist on their YouTube channel that’s full of older films, both classic and glorious trash, that is fully available for free. For physical media nuts like myself, they have the Warner Archive Collection, a Blu-ray series of remastered films ranging as far back as the beginning of their history, once again ranging from the highest to the lowest in their catalog. Look up this collection on any major online shopping network, and you’ll be greeted with a treasure trove of choices.
Whether you’re looking for either the best of Joan Crawford or a horrifically miscast Humphrey Bogart in The Return of Doctor X, then the Warner Archives Collection has you covered. If they’re willing to keep fresh copies of films that I guarantee you even your average cinephile couldn’t name, it really doesn’t make sense why they wouldn’t want to maintain Speed Racer, especially since the Blu-ray edition is now quite hard to find. Besides, if there were ever a film deserving to be seen in the highest definition possible, it’s Speed Racer.
‘Speed Racer’ Demands To Be Seen in 4K
While it’s true that Speed Racer paved the way for our current age of green-screen-dominated slop, nothing that Hollywood has made in the past near-20 years has looked or felt like Speed Racer. A handful of films have either tried to bring anime to life or used anime-adjacent style, but none have done so with the ingenious editing and fidelity to detail that it holds. Even when you hit the few rough patches where the special effects do look a bit too Spy Kids 3D-era, they fly by so fast that you barely notice, thanks to avant-garde editing that successfully does what Ang Lee tried to do in Hulk.
Every moment is colorful to a degree that’s Seussian, even more of a Saturday morning cartoon than the original anime ever was, and that includes when the film isn’t on the racetrack. When it is on the racetrack, it’s a Hot Wheels movie laced with liquid cocaine and LSD, with some sequences opening your third eye like it’s Alejandro Jodorowsky behind the wheel. The tragic irony of this whole situation is that Speed Racer, a fiercely and unambiguously anticapitalist blockbuster, is being prevented from continuing to melt people’s minds at maximum power because Warner Bros. can’t find a way to make enough money off of it. To paraphrase another much-maligned Wachowski film, yet another work of radical art is being failed by a machine designed purely…to create profit.
