Have I mentioned lately that I love summer movie season? Not since last week? Ok, I love summer movie season!

And this weekend my husband and I went to see Speed Racer, a special film for us, since our mutual love of the original cartoon was one of the things that made us fall wide-eyed in love twenty years ago. Speed Racer was one of my first great loves in life, up there with Peter Pan and Shaun Cassidy, and it was thrilling to find a man who would watch those cartoons in unabashed good fun with me.

What I loved most about the movie was that it reviewed itself very early on. There is a flashback scene in which the young Speed Racer is in school taking a math test. He looks at the page and as he reads the words of a problem, they turn from "if Suzie has 640 jellybeans and Janie has..." to "blah blah blah blah... Start your engines. Go, Speed, go!" That completely summed it up for me: the race scenes were what made the movie and everything else was just a lot of blah blah blah.

Unfortunately, the movie (outside of the racing scenes) took itself far too seriously and included far too much of the blah blah. I missed the campy, over the top dialog of the original. I didn't want to hear Pops Racer say Speed couldn't change the world by driving a car, and I didn't want to have Speed try to hit the bad boys in their wallets. Blah blah blah. I wanted one long, insane race against evil rather than races interspersed with blah blah.

There was an audio clip from the original series during the closing credits -- something along the lines of "Speed Racer, the fate of the world rests in your hands." I heard that and thought, "Yeah! Now that's what I'm talking about." Speed needs to beat the Devil in a race around the world, punch him square in the mouth at the end, causing Osama bin Laden's heart (like the Grinch's) to swell to three times its size, Israelis and Palestinians to engage in a group hug and Goodyear to pay women an equal wage.

Still the race scenes were dizzying, fun and innovative. The cars fought like the best kung fu warriors and came equipped with spectacular weaponry. The pace was blindingly fast, and the twists and turns took some getting used to. (I admit, I felt a little motion sick at first.)

Mark and I disagreed on how compelling the action scenes were, especially relative to Iron Man. I was much more engaged in the racing scenes than in any part of Iron Man, while Mark found them both (in terms of the action scenes) equally engaging. (We both agreed that Iron Man was a much, much, much better movie overall, but for me, the high of the action scenes in Speed Racer beat the high of the action scenes in Iron Man by several fast paced miles.)

I wish the movie makers had paid attention to their own internal review: less seriousness, more campy fun; less talk, more Mach 5. But regardless of the format, cartoon or live action, Sprittle and Chim Chim remain annoying. It's good to know that some things never change.