Speed Racer: The Unexpected Dodgeballer

So, yesterday I told you how Byron Preiss Multimedia had acquired the rights to Speed Racer, I was hired to write a brand-new novel titled Speed Racer: Leviathan, and then Multimedia went into bankruptcy. But before the doors closed, I was able to get the publishing rights on what I’d written transferred to me with a timely contract negotiation.

So, what happened? Well, in 2003, I got back in touch with the Speed Racer folks to see if they’d be interested in StarWarp Concepts picking up the licensing rights to publish the book. They were, and a new round of contract negotiations started. It all looked good; in fact, it all looked great. The Speed folks, who’d been excited by my plot and writing samples, couldn’t wait to see an adult Speed Racer novel hit bookstores.

Then everything came to a screeching halt in summer 2004.

An unexpected complication (well, unexpected for me) had popped up: cable station ABC Family and its parent company, Disney, had just opened talks for a new Speed animated series. And until a deal was reached or passed on, Speed Racer Enterprises couldn’t license any version of the character, including the one I’d cooked up. And if Disney ultimately wanted exclusive use of the franchise’s book rights, that’d be the end for me.

Okay, I was willing to wait to see how things turned out. It wasn’t like anybody else had come up with an adult Speed, after all.

Then the other shoe dropped at the end of the summer.

Apparently, Speed had a big fan in actor Vince (Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers) Vaughan, who walked into 20th Century Fox one fine day and announced he wanted to play Racer X in a live-action Speed Racer movie. At the time, those rights were held by Lauren Shuler Donner, one of the producers of the very successful X-Men movies; for years, she’d been trying to get a Speed movie in production. And now she had a big-name actor who wanted to be in it.

Well, that drove the last nail into the coffin of my Speed book. With Fox and Disney both giving some serious consideration to the property, and with publication rights involved in the mix, there wasn’t a chance in hell of a small-press publisher (me) being allowed to publish a competing version of the franchise. Which I could understand—if you’re paying major bucks for the rights to license something, you’re not gonna be too happy about a smaller publisher coming out with a novel featuring the same characters, especially when you’re trying to sell your own books.

So after getting an apologetic phone call from the Speed Racer folks I reluctantly threw a tarp over the Mach 5, locked the garage door, and walked off into the sunset…

(As we all know now, a Speed Racer movie did finally hit movie screens in 2008, courtesy of new producer Joel Silver and The Matrix directors The Wachowski Brothers—but not with Vince Vaughan as Racer X. That part went to Lost’s Matthew Fox. And it was…okay.)

But I gotta say, that Mark Zug cover painting for Leviathan sure was sweet. And the writing wasn’t so bad, either.  😉

Come back tomorrow, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Speed Racer™ & © 2012 Speed Racer Enterprises