The Speed Racer trailer is jammin’ down the pedal like he’s never comin’ back.

I’m going to go ahead and run afoul of a lot of movie sites – some of which are my closest blog pals like Ray and maybe Piper – and say that the new Speed Racer trailer delivered by the Wachowski brothers from Warner Bros. is something pretty spectacular. And I mean that literally; it’s a spectacle, it’s something wild and foolish and koo-koo and bizarre. And with respect to every movie blogger whose opinions I read and admire daily, this trailer absolutely works for me in a wild, stupid, batshit insane way.

Here it is to watch; go to Moviefone to download an HD version if you’d like.

Let me qualify this, briefly if I can. When I was a little kid, my best friend and I used to play this game where we’d dump out a big bucket of toy cars, take turns choosing and dividing them up, and race them all against each other down the hallway, around the bend in his parents’ room, through an adjoining bathroom and back to his bedroom again – an oval track frought with carpet and furniture hazards. Your car was disqualified from the race if you pushed it so hard that it flipped over onto its roof. In selecting our team’s cars at the beginning of the game, there were two choices that would ensure your victory. One was a diecast double-decker bus that could not possibly flip over onto its back.

The other choice – of course – was a replica of Speed Racer’s Mach 5. Because there was no way, ever, that the Mach 5 could lose a race. Couldn’t happen.

More about Speed after the jump. And I’ll touch on Adam West, why the Transformers still suck, the Wachowskis, and circling back to this trailer, too.

Somewhere along the line of TV viewing when I was a kid, I learned not to take some things too seriously. The old Speed Racer cartoons, likely coupled with the Adam West-era Batman, had a lot to do with this evolution. I watched Speed Racer for the exciting visuals, the cool racing, the jumping car and cartoon violence, sure. But I also figured out that there was something odd about it, about the way the characters reacted in fear, surprise or anger – the way they were animated and the strange, stilted dialogue. Certainly some of this was due to the animation’s foreign nature to me, but at the same time it taught me that this was all supposed to be strange, stylized fun.

If you read this site, you know that I have no love of last year’s Transformers, and now – seeing the Speed Racer trailer, it’s even more obvious to me why that is. I have a much closer connection to Speed, Pops and Trixie to be sure. I bought into that world much more personally than that of Optimus, Megatron and the rest of the Dorkobots. But I think that was partially because the Transformers all took themselves so damn seriously, speaking in that stilted Shatner/Shakespearean crap-talk and pretending as though transforming from a boombox into a robot somehow made your intergalactic struggle of good vs. evil more lofty and universally important.

It didn’t and it doesn’t. It’s all foolishness, but at least Speed and his gang presented a solidly visual, exciting show that appealed to me and my sense of fantasy without all the self-importance that I wasn’t interested in dealing with.

But I don’t know if Speed Racer will make a good movie, and the chances are greater than not that it won’t. This trailer, however, represents a dynamically innovative use of purely cinematic tools to sell the movie. And if the Wachowski brothers fail with this, then at least they’re going to fail spectacularly and with a loads of style. We’re all still smarting over being burned by the Matrix sequels, so a lot of us aren’t willing to cut the W-boys any slack*. We should, however, because they are dynamite filmmakers who do create sights, sounds and scenes that are new and amazing.

The point of a movie trailer is to put me into the movie theater seat, as quickly as possible. This trailer does that, extraordinarily so. I mean, sweet merciful spears of Leonidas – look at the frigging Mach 5 jumping over those other cars. That is EXACTLY how the Mach 5 is supposed to look when it jumps over other cars.

*incidentally, I don’t hold anything against the Wachowskis. They did not let me down. They lost a thread, strayed off the path. But they also created a trilogy of movies the likes of which had not been seen previously. They out-Lucased Lucas, at a time that he should have been the one to easily knock it out of the park.