Speed Racer: Still a Demon on Wheels

As I explained yesterday, I’ve written for licensed properties like Spider-Man, Doctor Who, and the X-Men. But do you think those are the only characters I got the chance to destroy—er, I mean, play with? (Not if you saw my post on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles novels I came close to writing.) Unfortunately, not every project I was meant to write got past the creative stage and were cast into…DEVELOPMENT HELL.

Welcome to yet another “Tale of Development Hell.” Today’s ghoulish tale is called:

SPEED RACER: LEVIATHAN

“It’s ten years later, and he’s still a demon on wheels…” So went the tagline for a proposed novel that spent close to ten years itself starting and stopping along the track to a planned publication date—and never reached the finish line.

It all started in the late ’90s, when Byron Preiss Multimedia (publisher of the Marvel Novels line) picked up the novel rights to the cartoon series. I was involved in the meetings (being an in-house fiction editor and resident “pop culture expert” at the time), and had suggested a different approach to the property:

We’d set it ten years after the series and make Speed, Trixie, and Sparky adults. Speed’s little brother, Spridle, would be eighteen years old, Pops Racer would be semiretired, and Speed’s big brother, Rex (aka Racer X) would still be a super-spy. Speed no longer drove the Mach 5 because of a major accident that made him question his ability as a racecar driver. (Think of it as Speed starring in a remake of the Tom Cruise movie Days of Thunder…or maybe a dramatic remake of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.)

It would be a James Bond–type thriller that featured the return of the infamous Mammoth Car (a mile-long auto made of gold), an alliance of two series villains—Cruncher Block, owner of the Mammoth Car, and Dr. McFife, creator of the monster car (the “Car With a Brain” episode)—and a global threat that would present Speed with his greatest challenge ever. It was a big-budget action/adventure movie in prose form.

Well, the idea impressed everybody so much that I was hired to write it. I plotted the whole thing and wrote the first three chapters to show what I’d do. Then I sat down with artist Mark Zug (I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, Septimus Heap) and we worked out what Speed & Co. would look like ten years later, as well as the design for a new Mammoth Car (now named Leviathan)—and as you can see from the rough cover design we presented to Speed Racer Enterprises, his final painting was pretty damn impressive.

Unfortunately, Multimedia closed its doors soon after—but I was smart enough to get the C.O.O. to sign over to me the rights to the material I’d created before the end. That meant I could go and negotiate directly with Speed Racer Enterprises to see about getting the book published through another house.

But…did I? Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion!

Speed Racer™ & © 2012 Speed Racer Enterprises