Yes, race fans, Speed Racer is back! Well, sort of anyway. The Speed Racer: The Next Generation series started on the Nicktoons Network back in 2008. Next Generation not only premiered at #1 on the network, but has consistently had high weekly ratings in spite of the poor reviews of the 2008 movie Speed Racer starring Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci that opened the week after the new show premiered.
Next Generation is set in a time after the events of the original Speed Racer series (which aired in 1967). Speed Racer has disappeared, but is alive, and the Racing Academy is still teaching the next generation how to race. Speed's son X Racer is at the top of the class until an orphan named after his father appears. And when it's discovered that the new Speed's skills rival his own, people began to take notice.
In the first Next Generation movie, aptly called The Beginning, the young Speed Jr. learns that he truly is the son of the legend and he begins the journey to make his long-absent father proud.
Speed Jr. is helped out by a few friends, including Conor, the team mechanic; Lucy, the team navigator; and ChimChim, a robot monkey who seems to work as both a mascot and an assistant to Conor. In Comet Run, they work together on the Mach 6 to finish a gas-less engine to revolutionize the auto industry and make racing more eco-friendly.
The new movie builds on the series and the first two movies - The Beginning and Fast Track. In Comet Run, Trillionaire Dickie Radford, a short British auto-maker with a penchant for outlandish claims (seemingly based on Richard Branson, the trillionaire leader of the Virgin empire), has revealed a revolutionary Eco-Car. Radford claims the Eco-Car will run 100s of miles on a gallon of gas. Radford is so confident in his new car that he sponsors a race. If he loses, he'll sign his company over to the winner and walk away.
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