IT'S THE WACKY RACES!!!, the wacky racers must race all over the world to win to be the world best wacky racer...but they better watch out for the double o, Dick Dastardly! The series was inspired by the movie The Great Race. It ran on CBS from September 14, 1968 to September 5, 1970. Seventeen episodes were produced with each episode featuring two different races for a total of 34 races in all. Attempting to foil the racers' efforts was the show's resident stereotyped villain Dick Dastardly and his sidekick, Muttley the dog. Dastardly would gain a large lead then, like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, execute all sorts of elaborate schemes to trap, divert, blow up or stop the other racers, only to see them backfire spectacularly. The intended object lesson may have been that Dastardly had what was arguably one of the fastest cars in the series and might have won several races had he only kept his mind on the race and off dirty tricks. Like Wile E Coyote, Dastardly never saw victory. Many of Dastardly's plots look suspiciously similar to those used in Road Runner episodes, which might be explained by the fact that Mike Maltese was a scriptwriter on both series. One of the original plans for the series was that the races themselves would be part of a live-action quiz show with Merrill Heatter and Bob Quigley Productions, the team behind the television series Hollywood Squares. Heatter-Quigley's plan was that contestants would actually bet on which Wacky Racer would cross the finish line first. Although the game show concept was eventually scrubbed, the series still retained a Hanna-Barbera Heatter-Quigley dual production credit. In 1988, a made-for-TV movie, "Around The World With The Wacky Racers" was planned as part of Hanna-Barbera's Superstars 10 series of TV movies but it never got past the concept stage. A boxed-set 3-DVD release of the complete series was made available in Japan on August 10, 2001. The set had both English and Japanese audio. Warner Home Video released the entire series, with commentaries and other extras, in a DVD box set on October 26, 2004. In Britain Warner released the series on three separate discs with no extra features. This edition was exclusive to Virgin Megastores, from the time it was released to when it was discontinued. The complete box set of 'Wacky Races' which has until now only been available in the U.S. was released on the 31 July 2006 as a HMV exclusive - but is essentially the standard volumes I, II, and III in their respective cases, with no extras. Certain characters in the cartoon are clearly based on characters in Blake Edwards' The Great Race (1965). In ReBoot, season 3, Cyrus reboots as a parody toy of Dick Dastardly and Frisket reboots as a parody toy of Muttley. Life size working replicas of the vehicles have been built in England and appear annually at the Goodwood Festival Of Speed, with new additions being added each year. Replicas currently exist of The Mean Machine (00), The Boulder Mobile (1), The Creepy Coupe (2), Convert-A-Car (3), The Crimson Haybailer (4), The Compact Pussycat (5), The Army Surplus Special (6), The Arkansas Chug-a-lug (8)and The Turbo Terrific (9).