Wacky Racing: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da1CjGTFgoY This Peugeot ad] features the racers from [[Wacky Races]]. Naturally, the car being advertised is the last man standing.

 

* ''[[Speed Racer]]'' had the Mach 5, Dangerous Courses and a ''Vehicular Acrobatics Team''. And let's not get started on [[Speed Racer (film)|the movie!]]

* In cartoons and anime marketed towards kids, an episode like this is inevitable. Most don't involve violence at first, [[Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat|until at least one bad guy starts cheating]]. [[Hilarity Ensues]].

* Episode 9 of [[Carnival Phantasm]]

 

* A story in ''[[Superboy]]'' had Roxy enter Cadmus's Whiz Wagon in a super-powered cross-country car race called the Demolition Run, organised by a mysterious crime-boss called Mr Big.

* ''Archie's RC Racers'' was one of the stranger entries in the [[Archie Comics]] franchise. In it, two teams of Riverdale teenagers, led by Archie and Reggie, travel across the United States racing radio-controlled cars, while foiling the dastardly schemes of the villainous Babette and her bungling henchmen.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* ''[[Silent Movie (film)|Silent Movie]]'' features a wheelchair race in a hospital that gets pretty crazy.

 

* The broomstick race through a dragon preserve mentioned in ''[[Quidditch Through the Ages]]''.

 

* ''[[Gekisou Sentai Carranger]]'' and to a lesser extent ''[[Engine Sentai Go-onger]]'' combine this trope with ''[[Super Sentai]]'', which is already pretty damn wacky.

* ''[[Top Gear]]''. OH. ''MY.'' FREAKING. FORD. '''TOP GEAR.''' Just imagine how many challenges like this they have done... Bugatti Veyron (1000 bhp supercar) vs. Eurofighter Typhoon (top-rated fighter jet) in a drag race (vertical vs. horizontal), Mazda M-5 vs. a greyhound (the dog, not the bus), compact car vs. [[Le Parkour]], Historic People Carrier/Motorhome/Passenger Bus/Airport Vehicle Racing, etc. That image at the top of this article is a screenshot of a race between driving pairs. Yes, there are two drivers to each double-decker car; one sits at the bottom and handles the gas and brakes, while the other sits at the top and handles the steering.

** How about the double-decker car racing, depicted above? The catch is simple: you sit above, your partner sits below. You have the steering, he has the acceleration. Oh, and apart from the [[Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny|ENGLAND vs GERMANY]] race, the same challenge have been repeated in the Ashens Special, against Top Gear Australia hosts.<ref>Except the steering car has been turned upside down. What's important to mention, ''not'' for the English team. [[Jeremy Clarkson]] [[Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|Is A Cheating Bastard.]]</ref>

 

* The ''[[Car Wars]]'' boardgame by Steve Jackson Games. It's [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] and [[After the End|the aftermath of a nuclear war]] and everyone drives around in cars with machine guns and lasers and the like. Sometimes there are races, but other times the drivers just [[Vehicular Combat|blow seven bells out of each other's vehicles in an arena or on the road]].

** "EcksEcksEcksEcksian Cart Wars" in ''[[GURPS]] [[Discworld]] Also''. A low-tech parody of the above combined with the ''[[Mad Max]]'' sequence in ''[[Discworld/The Last Continent|The Last Continent]]'', and an experiment in seeing how far the ''GURPS Vehicles'' rules could be pushed before they broke. [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|Pretty far, it turns out]].

** "CarToon Wars" in ''[[Toon (game)|Toon]] Tooniversal Tour Guide''. Another Steve Jackson parody of their own project, this one even more like ''[[Wacky Races]]'' than the others since it's set in a cartoon universe.

 

* Every ''[[Mario Kart]]'' style game qualifies. Courses with cannons that launch you to the top of mountains aren't exactly common in real life.

** Even games that don't actually use karts are subject to this, such as ''[[Kirby]]'s Air Ride'' or ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog|Sonic]] Riders''.

** It gets better in 2010 ''Hot Pursuit'', where you can play as the [[Cowboy Cop]] wrecking the wacky racers' fun.

* ''[[N-Gen Racing]]'': Racing planes through canyons, tho lower you go the faster you go, of course, while using the plane's weapon systems to cause damage to your opponents.

* ''[[Extreme-G]]'': Superfast motorbikes with all sorts of weapons.

** The original ''Extreme-G'' on the N64 was able to actually overdo the wackiness. There was a cheat code that enabled you to get a random secondary weapon just by clicking it's fire button as opposed to running over a power-up on the track. And this worked for the A.I. racers too. Cue much rocketspamming and the amount of carnage going on could mess up the N64's processor and graphics and reduce the game to its bare wireframe models in that race.

* A sidequest in ''[[Majoras Mask]]'' is a [[Rolling Attack|rolling Goron]] race, which is much like, and about as safe as, [[Don't Try This At Home|climbing inside monster truck tires and racing them down a mountain]].

* ''[[SuperTuxKart]]''

 

* In ''[[Misfile]]'', we see it done by Cassiel in Ash's race against Logan.

 

* The [[Trope Namer]] is ''[[Wacky Races]]'', which in turn is based on ''[[The Great Race]]''. That fits the driver and car aspects of this trope.

** And the ''[[Fender Bender 500]]'', which replaced everyone except Dick Dastardly and Muttley with classic [[Hanna-Barbera]] characters.

** ''[[Laff-A-Lympics]]'' frequently included races as well, with various vehicles. Hanna-Barbera is fond of this trope.

** Shall we mention the [[Mind Screw]] chase sequence in ''[[Tom and Jerry]]: [[The Movie]]'' here?

*** Additionally, there's the direct-to-video movie ''Tom and Jerry: The Fast and the Furry'', where the cat and mouse enter a race to win a mansion after being kicked out of their old home. At various legs of the race, they and the other contestants had to continually modify their cars for different types of travel, culminating with a race back to the start in five minutes. The movie ends with a [[Take That]] against [[Lighter and Softer|family friendly programming]]. Yep.

*** I read on [[The Other Wiki]] that they'd planned on making a ''Wacky Races'' movie as part of the ''Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10'' mini-series, but ended up ''not'' doing so. Anyone else think it ended up becoming ''Reluctant Werewolf''? (''Could have been. The feature was to have been titled '''Around The World with the Wacky Racers,''' but perhaps the H-B staff felt that a two-hour animated race wasn't sustainable.'')

*** It probably wasn't ''Werewolf,'' as when Hanna-Barbera took out its two-full-page ad in Variety in 1987 announcing the Superstars 10 project, that feature was among the ten listed, as well as the Wacky Races feature. If memory serves, ''Yogi & The Space Bears'' was not among the original ten, so that may have been the substitute.

* [[The BBC]]'s ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20110906214736/http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/grownups/about/programmes/kerwhizz.shtml Kerwhizz]'' is a mostly-CGI, pre-school game show, in which three teams consisting of a kid and his/her android [[Non-Human Sidekick]] answer questions before racing their pods around a themed "race world". One suspects the writers may be paying homage to ''[[Wacky Races]]'' with titles like "Fun Food Freeway", "Moonlight Night Flight" and "The Deserted Desert Dash".

* ''Bailey's Comets'' was an obscure De Patie-Freleng show from 1973 (airing on CBS) about ten teams of roller skaters, including the titular Comets, who are on a cross-country marathon race to find a treasure.

* One episode of ''[[Cyberchase]]'' was about Matt, Jackie, Inez, and Digit helping Princess Creech enter such a race so that she can become Queen of Tikiville, but at the same time, The Hacker also wants to rule Tikiville, and therefore he resorts to cheating in the race so he can win.

* It's a tradition in ''[[Transformers]]'' to have at least one such race per franchise, except during the Beast Era when such things would have been ridiculous.

** Yes, having ''[[Transformers: Robots in Disguise|bullet trains]]'' participate in a rally race [[Sarcasm Mode|isn't ridiculous at all]].

 

* [[Truth in Television]]: Most rally raids, including the Paris-Dakar Rally and the Baja 1000. More often than not, these rallies are not much about who finishes first, but more about ''who finishes!''

** Of particular note is the 1963 East African Safari Rally. Eighty-four cars started the rally. Five days later ''[[wikipedia:Unsinkable Seven|seven]]'' crossed the finish line.