Speed Racer has been broadcasted for the Rio de Janeiro state (the place I live) in the early 70's. At that time National Broadcasting was just beginning to crawl. In Sao Paulo, everything came up first, including the very firstly TV transmissions. The dubbing business was kind of very small then, so they gave more priority to movies. Since the time I began to watch Speed wasn't the very first, that explains in part why I've always watched it dubbed.
Well, right now, the complete Racer Team names list:
| Speed Racer | Speed Racer, voiced by the late Cleonir dos Santos, who provided his voice for Mr Sulu in the recent redub of the original Star Trek series. He is also famous as "official" voices for Scrappy Doo (Scooby's nephew) and Mickey Mouse. In his very seldom TV appearances he was playing a folk guitar player and singer in a soap opera in the seventies. |
| Trixie | Trixie |
| Rex Racer | Rex Racer, voiced by the late André Filho, who gave his voice to Patrick Stewart in the first Deep Space 9 episode a few years ago. André Filho also worked in the current dub work, but instead of redubbing Rex, he did the guest characters, mostly the bad guys. |
| Racer X | Corredor Mascarado (only in the first appearence) Corredor X (all other episodes) Note: "X" in our language is pronounced closely as " she's ". It's also the way we tell children to smile during a photo section: "Diga X" = "Say cheese". |
| Sparky | Sparky's name is the same as in English, pronounced as it is. |
| Spritle | Gorducho (in most episodes) The best translation for Gorducho (Spritle's portuguese name) is "Chubby". The only thing is in new series he's still called Gorducho, but now he's slim... : } |
| Chim Chim | Zequinha (i. m. e.) |
| Mom | Senhora (señora) Racer |
| Pops | Pops |
| Mach 5 | Mach5 (Pronunciation: "match" "sin - coo" (almost like Spanish)) |
Curious note: The advertisement for the show was "Capitão (captain) Meteoro", although the name Speed Racer was the real one. Maybe they were going to use the Spanish name, but they changed their mind... : )
About the dubbing: they made a very big effort to lip sync our language with japanese. Sometimes there were mistakes just like Speed's dubber say "Rex" together with Corredor X, and some lack of sync now and then. Sometimes other character's untranslated name in the first part of an episode could be translated in the second part. It happens for instance with Snake Oiler, called later "Cobra". : }.
The dubbing team was based in a Rio de Janeiro studio. The only name I know is André Filho, Racer X's voice. Right now he's not dubbing so often, although he's known as "official" Brazilian voice of some actors, like, Lee Majors and Robert Wagner. He has even a radio program. The Speed's voice is very familiar to all of us. I don't know his name right now, but he's nowadays a very old person, around his 70's, but he's still working, because his vocal talent allows him to make several kid and young dubbing roles, in both movies and cartoons. About the other ones, most of them gave up dubbing, and it's almost impossible to collect information about them.
Anyway, in despite of all the problems, Speed Racer is, undoubtedly, still a very cool cartoon for our children, and most people from our generation give it a look every time they re-run. : ) Sometimes some clever kids laugh about some impossible things that happen during each episode, but they enjoy it the same way. The magic is still the same. : )