Speed Racer was the Americanized version of a television cartoon series created by the legendary anime artist Tatsuo Yoshida in the early 1960's. Mach GoGoGo, the story of a young race car driver, Go Mifune, was inspired not only by Yoshida's earlier cartoon Pilot Ace, but also, according to interviews with the artist, two big screen American films Viva Las Vegas and Goldfinger.  Mach GoGoGo proved popular enough in Japan to be translated into an anime series in 1967 at Yoshida's Tatsunoko Productions studio, with the one season series then exported to America for syndicated runs by Trans-Lux.  Obviously in need of an overhaul for American audiences, the Japanese language series was handed over to Peter Fernandez, an editor, writer, and sound effects jack of all trades who had previously worked on Japanese imports, Astro-Boy and Gigantor, two Animes that set the stage in America for the massive success of Speed Racer. Fernandez, in charge of not only editing the episodes for American TV,  but also in providing an entirely new dub track, rechristened Mach GoGoGo as Speed Racer, while Fernandez himself voiced Speed and the mysterious Racer X. Along with vocal talents Corinne Orr, Jack Grimes and Jack Curtis, Fernandez had the difficult task of not only completely rewriting the episode scripts into English, while maintaining the basic story lines, but also fitting the new English dialogue to match the mouth movements of the animation, a challenge that resulted in the Speed Racer cartoon's distinctive "sound," with elongated sentences and plenty of "ah's!" and "oh's!" to fill the screen time of the characters' mouthing.

The Speed Racer Cartoon series reached areas beyond the United States: at about the same time the American series was aired, a Latin American adaptation of the series named Meteoro, aired on Argentinian TV screens as well as in Mexico on Televisa's XHGC 5. In the early 1990 's the series made a comeback as reruns on MTV broadcast in the early morning hours. In 1993, the series was rebroadcast in syndication concurrently with a new American-created remake courtesy of the newly established "Speed Racer Enterprises," with distribution by Group W's international unit. In this version, all references to Trans-Lux were removed, with the opening sequence including a recreated logo, and the episode titles and closing credits were re-created. The re-created closing credits include three typographical errors: Jack Grimes is misspelled Jack "Crimes," Hiroshi Sasagawa is misspelled Hiroshi "Sasacawa," and "Yomiko" is misspelled "Yumiko."  This version later aired on the Cartoon Network in the late afternoon (and later on in late night/overnight), and is also the version released on Region 1 DVD. The News Corporation owned motorsports-centric network, Speed Channel, also aired this series during morning hours in 2003. And it can also be seen on the streaming video service Hulu, where the entire series is available. In addition, a Speed Racer daily comic strip written and drawn by Mort Todd ran in the New York Post from 2000-2001.   IGN ranked the original Speed Racer series at #29 on its "Best 100 Animated Series" list.  At Otakon 2015, Funimation announced that they have acquired the license to Speed Racer from Tatsunoko and will release it on Blu-ray for the first time in Japanese with English subtitles