Speed Racer Mach 5.  Credit: Warner Bros. 

Are you going to catch the new Speed Racer film that opens today in the San Francisco Bay Area? If you, like me, were a fan of the original Japanese cartoon series, you probably will.

There’s a beer connection to Speed Racer, you know. Think Bear Republic. Richard Norgrove Jr,, who founded the Healdsburg, CA. brewpub and brewery with his father in 1995, races cars in his spare time and he admits he was a big Speed Racer fan when he was a kid.

Here’s part of an interview I did with him in 2003 in Northwest Brewing News.

If you’re a cartoon nut and remember the Japanese Speed Racer cartoon series on television, you can probably relate to these beers says head brewer Richard Norgrove, Jr.
Racer 5 is an very, very hoppy India Pale Ale, about 6.5 to 7 percent alcohol. Racer X _ who in the cartoon series always wore a mask and did the most extreme things with a race car _ is a double IPA. “It comes in at 8.1 percent and a lot of hops,” Richard says.
The average human palate can only detect about 85 or 90 IBI, he said. After that, things blur. “We come up with about 125 IBU. (A typical Budweiser is about 11 IBU).
“But we balance that with the malt and yeast character, so it’s still a drinkable beer. People have told me it creeps up on you.

The film’s being roundly panned by the critics, by the way…Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review:

Failing that, I suppose we could subject them to Warner Brothers’ new live-action feature film, also called “Speed Racer,” which was written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, the maestros of “The Matrix.” Like so many other expensive, technologically elaborate big-screen adaptations of venerable pop-culture staples, this movie sets out to honor and refresh a youthful enthusiasm from the past and winds up smothering the fun in self-conscious grandiosity. The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery. READ MORE...

Here’s some background from the New York Times WHEELS blog:

The television show “Speed Racer” first aired in Japan in 1966 and appeared in the United States a year later. The show disappeared from television through most of the 1980s, as more sophisticated anime like “Star Blazers” and “Robotech” became popular. It wasn’t until the 1990s that “Speed Racer” reruns returned (on MTV of all places). It has since been rerun on various cable channels and used in commercials for Volkswagen and Geico.