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Wacky Races: Cartoon
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Wacky Races is a piece of pure graphical genius. Infogrames has infused 1968 Hanna-Barbera animation with state-of-the-art Dreamcast power to bring you the best looking kart game to ever grace a Sega platform. Using 'toon vision,' 2D cartoon characters are transformed and brought to life in a 3D world. It's the perfect combination of 2D and 3D rolled up into one neat-o little package. Players can even choose whether or not the racers keep their black outlines, making the game look even more like a controllable cartoon.
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Wacky Races is a cross between South Park Rally and Mario 64, and stars classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. While this kart racing game doesn't really bring anything new to the racing genre, it does bring hours of lighthearted fun.
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Granted, Wacky Races never achieved the phenomenal success of The Flintstones, but nethertheless enjoys an enduring popularity even today. Why? Well, Wacky Races not only appeals to children but to adults too, in two instances. Firstly, it brings back the nostalgia for their youth, and secondly it contains many jokes clearly inserted for the benefit of adults2, such as the name of Pat Pending for a professor, or the caricatures of well-known people such as the Red Baron. The show ... contains the tried-and-tested formulae for cartoon success - villains, heroes, incompetents and dim sidekicks - and manages to put them into a fresh format. Wacky Races has its own personality which cannot easily be imitated.
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Wacky Races takes advantage of a graphic technique known as cel shading to bring the cartoon characters and their environments to life. Cel shading gives the characters a stylistic appearance with sharp shadows playing against simple lines and limited texturing. Games employing this style have a cartoon-like quality to them. To further that cartoon feeling in Wacky Races, sound bites from each character are used during the races as well.
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In Sydney, Australia, Wacky Races debuted as a segment of a live afternoon program, Skeeter's Cartoon Corner on the Nine Network. The host, Skeeter the Paperboy (James Kemsley) would dial a child viewer's telephone number at the halfway point of an episode, and invite everyone in the household to vote for their favorite cars on a tally board. After the race, the young contestant, and the relative with the winning vehicle, would win prizes, including plastic model kits of the Wacky Races cars.
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The graphics in Wacky Races are absolutely stunning. From the get go, you feel like you’re watching a cartoon, and that feeling never really fades. None of the boxy clunkiness you’re used to from racers -- Wacky Races looks and feels like a Saturday morning marathon.
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Cartoon