Lab Notes
Nyock Nyock Nyock Nyock!

As I may have mentioned here a few months back, the Japanese word for gorilla is "gorira," and the word for whale is "kujira," and by smooshing the two together back in 1954, director Ishiro Honda created "Gojira," one of the most enduring (and endearing) monsters in movie history. The made-up word rang true to Japanese ears, conveying a sense of both immense size and wild, untamed power. The American transliteration "Godzilla" meant nothing by itself, but through long association it now communicates its own, slightly different message.

In fact, by stripping away the first syllable we get a suffix that can be appended to almost any word to shade it with context-dependent meanings. Without being told, we understand that "Truckzilla" is a particularly large and powerful truck, whereas a "bridezilla" is a woman of ordinary size and strength but with a disagreeable temper. So imagine the plight of a linguist thousands of years in the future, studying Ancient Modern English long after all memory of Ishiro's film has faded away. What do you make of all these "zilla" terms, and what can you really understand about their origins?

This kind of thing happens all the time when two cultures collide, and since cultures collide all the time, the world's languages are a true and glorious mess. The past is willfully obscure, and in many ways fiction does a better job of describing it than science ever could. Always forgiving, forgetting and creating anew, romance thrives on history's chaotic amnesia.

The media property known as Speed Racer has a similarly messy provenance, full of trans-lingual puns and double-entendres that I won't bother explaining here. Suffice it to say, the very adult and very Japanese cleverness of creator Tatsuo Yoshida did not fully translate, and would anyway have been wasted on the children who formed the show's American audience. So it's interesting that the Wachowski brothers—the same Andy and Larry who pioneered "bullet time" 3-D photography in The Matrix—have run wild with the tropes of a bad American voice-over, making a live-action movie out of them in full apparent ignorance of the phylogeny and ontogeny that spat them out.

Reviews and box-office performance have been mediocre so far, but I have to confess: I liked this movie a lot more than I was expecting to. Considering the mangled source material, the Wachowski brothers did a more than serviceable job of updating it to modern sensibilities while staying faithful to its—ahem!—original vision. Over the past 15 years Hollywood has gotten really good at spinning the straw of old TV shows—even dumb ones—into cinematic gold. In fact, the only real problem with Speed Racer is that the property itself is nearly irredeemable. Nearly, I say, but by blending in themes from other successful movies—including Spy Kids, The Godfather and the original 1975 version of Rollerball—and by setting the whole thing in a neon-dripping post-cyberpunk future of bloodsport and corporate intrigue, the Wachowskis manage to raise the bar quite a bit, turning even Speed Racer into a kind of morality tale. We don't believe a word of it, of course, but the superbright colors and pasted-on smiles reassure us that we're not supposed to. In fact, only the Ron Moore treatment could have produced a better movie; ditch the animals and children, change up the monikers a bit, scrape the cheese off and you might really have something. But with characters named Racer X, Spritle, Chim-Chim and Inspector Detector running around, there's only so much you can do.

Jump jack a future fact?

That's more highbrow analysis than I should cram into a dozen Lab Notes columns, but it's the context in which the movie's questionable science should be understood. This is a fairy tale, an Aesop fable, a translation of a translation that's lost whatever tenuous connection it ever had to the world of you and me and Isaac Newton. And on those terms—on its own terms, defiant and non-negotiable—it isn't half bad. Seriously.

Now, the most iconic Speed Racer image—and the one that survives best across four decades and 20,000 kilometers of cultural divide—is the "jump jack." This is a bit of homegrown wordplay, combining the mechanic's pneumatic jack (an object) with the track coach's jumping jack (an activity) to produce an object (and an activity) that throws a moving car several meters into the air, allowing it to leap over obstacles left behind by the less-than-scrupulous racers on the road ahead. It makes a distinctive nyock-nyock sound, too, which no one who's seen the cartoon could easily forget, no matter how much time has passed.

But would it work? A very light Formula One race car weighs 600 kilograms, and the fully extended jump jacks seem to project about half a meter below the bottoms of the tires. To lift the car three meters in the air, we'd need a vertical speed of about 7.7 meters per second. This would subject the driver to seven times the force of Earth's gravity, but only for 0.13 seconds, which would be uncomfortable but certainly survivable. More problematic is the total force involved: about 8,000 pounds, or 2,000 from each of four jacks at the corners of the frame. Assuming each jack is five centimeters in diameter, this equates to a pressure of about 45 atmospheres. This is less than one-10th the pressure in a fully loaded scuba tank, so, yeah, it's a workable system. Still, it would go off more like an explosion than like a garage lift, and even if the skids at the bottom of each jack were 10 times the size of the shaft, it's hard to imagine a paved surface that could stand up to that kind of impact. Most likely the skids would simply bury themselves in the blacktop and bring the car to an immediate—and extremely messy—halt.

Ah, but according to Speed Racer, the racetracks of our future aren't paved surfaces at all, but elaborately formed half-tubes of corrugated steel that are clearly designed to take a beating. With loops and jumps and figure eights that almost (but don't quite) defy gravity, these hypercircuits allow much higher speeds and much messier failure modes than the simple banked ovals of today's racing scene. Woe to the driver who loses traction, though; these cars spin out so often they might as well be at a square dance. And yet most of the drivers seem to recover most of the time—to get their noses pointed forward again before the next curve carries them out into empty space. Is that possible? Not under human control, not at those speeds. A very fast human who knows exactly what's going on can respond to changes in his environment in maybe a 10th of a second, but at 320 kph he'll have covered almost a hundred meters in that brief time. That's just too far, too fast, for flesh and bone to react. However, an electronic stability control system that responds to human inputs but also follows its own best judgment ... systems like this are used in modern fighter planes, which share a similar problem, and they seem to work pretty well. Heck, it's not really that different from the traction control, all-wheel-drive, antilock braking systems of a 2008 minivan. Just better, yeah, and faster.

At the boundary of cartoon physics

I could go on and on about thus stuff, but I won't. Automatic tire replacement while the car is in motion? Controlling a miniature air vehicle while also driving a fast car on a winding mountain road? Most of what happens in the movie—and in the cartoon before it—falls under one of two categories: just barely possible or just barely impossible. It seems to be the line itself—the jiggly membrane separating cartoon reality from actual reality—that has given Speed Racer its distinctive look and feel, and kept it alive in spite of its other failings.

Still, the strangest thing about the old cartoon was the juxtaposition of childish (both childlike and child-friendly) elements with the extreme violence of a corrupt racing circuit. Death was a commonplace event, and Speed himself was not above dealing it in the heat of battle. So thematically speaking, the biggest difference from the old cartoon is the use of fireproof crash pods in the movie's cars. A flashing light, a spray of foam, and suddenly the driver is rolling away in a sphere of bouncy rubber bubbles. Oh, it's still a rough sport, played very much for keeps, and we're told many times that people die in these races. But in any particular crash we happen to see, the driver escapes with minor injuries and lives to race another day. And this is possible, too, and an interesting enough addition to the Racer mythos to warrant a Wachowskiward nod. Nice touch, guys. And right there, at the boundary of cartoon physics, is an automotive innovation we might just live to see. And live beyond, only slightly worse for wear, one step closer my toons to thee.

Sources:
The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com): "Speed Racer," "Rollerball," "Gojira"
www.rottentomatoes.com: "Speed Racer"
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "Speed Racer"
Elert, Glen, ed.: The Physics Factbook, "Formula One Car"
Glover, Thomas J.: Pocket Ref, Sequoia Publishing, 1989