8/23/06: Wacky Races (1968)
                         “Oils Well That Ends Well”

We maintain some tight quality control here at RightWingTrash. Never mind that it’s now inherently conservative to have a movie where people drive around for fun. We’re still not killing space by writing up Cars or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Neither will we haul out just any old episode of Wacky Races.

The entire series was certainly great. You’ll have a hard time finding any adult of a certain age who doesn’t have fond memories of Peter Perfect (in his perfectly phallic Turbo Terrific) or Penelope Pitstop (in her Compact Pussycat). The villainous Dick Dastardly and Muttley also outlasted the original series—which was cancelled when the networks began purging Saturday mornings of any cartoons that seemed violent or unwholesome.

“Oils Well That Ends Well” would get the show banned today. The episode takes place in the America that all car enthusiasts call their home. It’s a wide-open space sitting on top of oil that’s just waiting to be tapped and spilled and flung and used as a clever comic device.

We start as the Wacky Racers— The Gruesome Twosome, The Ant Hill Mob, and all your other favorites—leave Oil Can, Oklahoma for Grease Gun, Texas. Despite being in the lead, Dick Dastardly starts plotting to sabotage the other racers. We get an idea of the moral subtext at work when Dastardly is immediately run over by an oil truck.

The episode’s mainly a rare showcase for The Sarge and Private Meekly, driving their Army Surplus Special. It’s weird that these Army men didn’t win more races. A tank is admittedly slow, but they could’ve literally blown away the competition. Reuters was probably already reporting that they did.

Anyway, the Army Surplus Special spends this race leading the pack. That includes when Dastardly gets run over—again—by his fellow racers after trapping them in an oil pipeline. We also see plenty of Luke and Blubber Bear in the Arkansas Chug-a-Bug. At one point, Luke taps into a well and fills his engine with crude oil. As the narrator proudly declares, “The Arkansas Chug-a-Bug is a real oil burner now!”

In fact, Luke’s spewing enough smoke to hinder the other racers. (Strictly unintentional, folks.) Only Dick Dastardly is villainous enough to have an alternative energy system. “Switch on the fan drive,” he tells Muttley, gearing up an auto accessory that would make Al Gore weep with joy.

Dastardly, of course, loses again. His big mistake is quickly drilling an oil gusher that he thinks will slow down his opponents. The other drivers simply race right through. Dastardly doesn’t realize he’s in a cartoon where Oil Is Good.

Sadly, the Army Surplus comes in second. The race is won by Professor Pat Pending in the Ring-A-Ding Covert-A-Car. This brings up the most irritating thing about Wacky Races. The bad guy is Dastardly, who does things like expanding the nose of his car so it can cross the finish line first. But early in this episode, the Professor turns his car into what the announcer describes as “a flying carpet on wheels.”

That’s just as bad as anything that Dastardly does, but the Professor gets treated like a lovable eccentric. One who defeats our American military by turning his car into a flying creation straight out of Islamic mythology. Good thing the hippies were in control back in ’68, because Goldwater would’ve held hearings over that kind of crap.

Make it your own: The series is out on DVD, and so are the spin-offs. There’s also a lot of merchandise out there—but we especially like this guy who provides free downloadable paper models of the Wacky Races cars. There’s a PayPal donation button you might want to click.

 

What did you think of this article?

Liked
Disliked
No Opinion