But, it’s surprising to hear anyone say “the old cartoon wasn’t like this,” since “Speed Racer” the cartoon always had a reputation for being more violent than other shows in the same age group. They regularly killed like a dozen people in each episode; there are crashes with explosions in the opening credits! The movie made a point of always showing the “foam bubble” thing that covered up a racer anytime his car crashed, which seemed at the time like an odd attempt to appease a censor or ratings board somewhere.

I can kind of see the thinking behind the bit with the piranha, since it’s something that you’d think would be cartoony, but just falls apart when you put it into live action — like Tom Cat getting divided into little pieces when he runs through a fence, which was more graphic (but not much less funny) when they did the same thing in Resident Evil.

There wasn’t blood in the old cartoons, and you certainly didn’t have pirhana devouring people’s fingers. Yeah, there were car crashes and explosions. They even had machine guns that never shot anyone.

But the director’s just don’t seem to get it. The torture scene was stupid to add, unneeded and from what I’ve heard the movie could’ve been ‘G’ without it (which is what the target rating was supposed to be for the movie).