'Speed Racer' reminds me of a time when audiences weren't sick of remakes, reboots, and redos. Now we're used to it. The movie studios have conditioned us to live a Groundhog's Day style of movie-going experience. Every year we see a new Spider-Man movie and a couple of remakes of remakes. 'Speed Racer' came out at a time when I was still hopefully of studios taking beloved properties and turning them into movies.
This spectacles of a movie cost one hundred and twenty million dollars to produce, but made about a third of that at the domestic box office. Fans of the movie still swear by it, but the original audience for the cartoon may have found it too childlike, and kid may have not even known what Speed Racer was. My dad, for example, was a huge 'Speed Racer' fan, but he didn't even see this movie.