AllofTV.net - Wacky Races

• Season 1

Wacky Races is an American animated television series from Hanna-Barbera Productions, about a group of 11 different cars racing against each other in various road rallies, with each driver hoping to win the title of the "World's Wackiest Racer." The cartoon was unusual in the large number of regular characters, twenty-three in total. The series was inspired by the movie The Great Race. The series ran on CBS from September 14, 1968 to September 5, 1970. Seventeen episodes were produced with each episode featuring two different races for a total of 34 races in all. Attempting to foil the racers' efforts was the show's resident stereotyped villain Dick Dastardly and his sidekick, Muttley the dog. Dastardly would gain a large lead then, like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, execute all sorts of elaborate schemes to trap, divert, blow up or stop the other racers, only to see them backfire spectacularly. The intended object lesson may have been that Dastardly had what was arguably one of the fastest cars in the series and might have won several races had he only kept his mind on the race and off dirty tricks. Like Wile E Coyote, Dastardly never saw victory. Many of Dastardly's plots look suspiciously similar to those used in Road Runner episodes, which might be explained by the fact that Mike Maltese was a scriptwriter on both series. One of the original plans for the series was that the races themselves would be part of a live-action quiz show with Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions, the team behind the television series Hollywood Squares. Heatter-Quigley's plan was that contestants would actually bet on which Wacky Racer would cross the finish line first. Although the game show concept was eventually scrubbed, the series still retained a Hanna-Barbera Heatter-Quigley dual production credit. In 1988, a made-for-TV movie, "Around The World With The Wacky Racers" was planned as part of Hanna-Barbera's Superstars 10 series of TV movies but it never got past the concept stage.