Movie Trivia

Director Alfonso Cuarón was once attached to direct with Johnny Depp starring.

According to producer Joel Silver, this movie was largely shot in green screen.

Rose McGowan was seriously considered for the part of Trixie, but the directors felt she was too old.

Milka Duno, who plays Kellie "Gearbox" Kalinkov, is an actual professional race car driver in the Indy Racing League.

Danica Patrick was reportedly offered a cameo but declined secondary to racing commitments with Andretti Green Racing and the Indy Racing League.

Peter Fernandez, the voice of Speed Racer and Racer X in the original cartoon series, plays the Race Announcer in this movie.

Keanu Reeves turned down the role of Racer X.

Some prints were shipped to movie theaters under the name "Race Chasers".

In the original draft of the script, Royalton's name was Remmington.

The view inside Speed's locker at the start of the film shows his watch to be a Heuer Monaco Sportiva, the same watch worn by Steve McQueen in the classic racing film Le Mans (1971).

Technically, Speed Racer (2008) was a first in many areas but two stand-out. It was the first film to use the Sony F23 Digital Film Camera and also to record in parallel to Sony HDCAM SR, for archive masters, and to Codex Digital Data Recorders for on-set uncompressed HD playback, digital dailies and file generation for editing and VFX.

Emile Hirsch was a big fan of the "Mahha GoGoGo" (1967) show, and used to watch it on Cartoon Network.

All the people that do a lot of driving in the movie did it in a "gimble"-- a cockpit of car attached to a hydraulic system that had the race sequences programmed into them.

In the first race, where Speed is in the criss-crossing section with Rex Racer's "ghost car", their motion resembles the fighter plane attack maneuver called the "Thach Weave", invented by US Navy pilot John S. Thach in World War II.

Shot in 60 days.

With the race cars being totally fictional, most of the pedestrian cars are actually based on real-life futuristic concept cars (one can easily spot an orange Rinspeed E-GO Rocket parked at the nearest to the screen when Rex picks Speed up from school). At one point, two Peugeot concept cars (the award-winning Peugeot 4002 Lion design and the quirky Moonster) are seen as well.

Zac Efron was originally casted as Speed Racer, but was soon replaced with Emile Hirsch.

At one point, after winning a race, Speed jumps out of his car car while it still moves, and strikes a pose as his car slows and stops just behind him. This is the trademark pose of Speed Racer, shown during the cartoon's opening credits.