I loved Wacky Races as a child, and funnily enough I still love it as an adult and I don't think it's aged badly. It's one of those things that gets criticized for having stereotypes in it and too much violence, but many of the characters are a lot more nuanced than they look, and all the violence is karmic and mild and generally involves Dick Dastardly's schemes backfiring in a world where being run over is just a minor inconvenience and explosives simply make you dirty and mess up your clothing.
Penelope Pitstop is the character most frequently vilified as being sexist, but any of that is a really minor aspect of her and is overshadowed by her strengths. She's shown to be a competent driver who wins races on her own steam, doesn't get distracted or intimidated by the interests of most of the male characters, and is mechanically adept and mends her car at one point using her hairpin. She seems to have designed and built all those gadgets she uses to put on her make-up while she's driving, which takes serious brains and skill and puts her in the same league as Professor Pat Pending. She's ditzy and she loves pink and silly girly stuff, but there's nothing wrong with being a girly girl. On occasion she is the damsel in distress who calls for help and gets rescued, but it doesn't happen that often, and in fact, Dick Dastardly ends up in a mess and calling for help more often than she does (Muttley, DO something!).
And Dick Dastardly and Muttley, what can I say? Some people would dismiss Dick as being just a generic villain with a moustache, but he goes much deeper than that. He and Muttley have a real camaraderie, despite they way they treat each other. Dastardly is shown at one point begrudgingly tickling Muttley, and Muttley is faultlessly loyal to his master (to the point that in one race where he gets left behind following a successful act of sabotage on another competitor, he desperately runs after the Mean Machine and tries to climb back on board, damaging the car in the process). Dastardly, far from being a born loser, is a competent and reasonably intelligent character who drives the best car in the race, and of course the running joke is that he spends every episode putting his foot down to generate an enormous lead so that he can stop and lay excessively elaborate traps that go wrong for him, and ultimately loses for that reason. He's something akin to a tragic hero in this respect (or at least a tragicomic antivillain) and this is the reason why Wacky Races is rather more complicated than a lot of people give it credit for. It's hard not to feel sympathy for Dastardly and Muttley and hope that they might win just one race, but also easy to laugh at them when they lose again.
Peter Perfect might look like a stereotypical hero, and he never cheats, and is chivalrous and kindhearted and keen to help Penelope Pitstop (and Dick Dastardly as well and probably anyone else in a mess), but he's also a bit of a pansy and not that skilled a driver, and the running joke is that his 'Turbo Terrific' frequently falls to pieces, usually to his utterance of quaint euphemistic expletives such as 'Fiddlesticks!'
Rufus Ruffcut is a musclebound lumberjack with a pet beaver, but manages not to fall into the trap of being portrayed as all muscle and no brain. He's not above underhand tactics, but he is shown to have quite a strong sense of fair play and will intervene if he thinks someone is abusing an advantage.
Pat Pending is an inventor and sometimes helps out other competitors and foils Dastardly's schemes. He cheats almost as much as Dastardly himself, although his methods tend to be less dangerous, not that it seems to matter much considering the physics of explosives and their negligible effect on human anatomy in this particular cartoon.
The Ant Hill Mob are seven dwarf Noo Yoick gangsters in a 1920s car (oddly named presumably after the Lavender Hill Mob, a film about London crooks pulling off a heist). They frequently break away from the race by trying to escape the police, but help out people they find in trouble.
The Slag Brothers, the Gruesome Twosome, and the Army Surplus Special are more stereotyped and less developed, with the Slags being two cavemen overwhelmed with body hair in a car made out of rocks, and the gruesome being a small vampire creature and a Frankenstein's monster in a hearse with a dragon in the roof. The Army Surplus are two soldiers in a tank.
The last two who are also pretty undeveloped and probably haven't aged well are Red Max, a German WW1 pilot in a car that looks like a Fokker, and an elderly impoverished redneck called just 'Luke' driving a car cobbled together out of his kitchen furniture with a live bear on it.
With Disney apparently redoing all their old cartoons there seems to have been an interest in recent years in film companies attempting to resurrect Wacky Races or the characters in it. A 2020 Scooby Doo film cast Dick Dastardly as a super villain, the villain being pretty cool in himself but looking more like Red Max than Dastardly and dissimilar in character, missing the point that the character's pathological addiction to cheating was his downfall. An attempt in 2017 to remake the original disappointingly omitted most of the original characters and ruined the ones it did use by stereotyping them, changing Peter Perfect into a dumb, vain jock, Penelope Pitstop into an obnoxious Mary Sue by removing her likable character flaw of bumbling dizziness in the name of anti-girly-girl bowdlerisation, . Even more ironically and disappointingly it had even worse violence than the original, with not only cartoon explosives but more disturbing, nonsensical, and not at all amusing violence mainly inflicted on Dastardly not as a result of his own actions, such as a character in one episode incessantly punching him in the face and him being tied up and beaten with sticks by a mob in another. I would love to see the original recreated in modern higher-budgeted animation in a way that does justice to what the characters and idea originally were, but after what I've seen I'm not hopeful for it.
Penelope Pitstop is the character most frequently vilified as being sexist, but any of that is a really minor aspect of her and is overshadowed by her strengths. She's shown to be a competent driver who wins races on her own steam, doesn't get distracted or intimidated by the interests of most of the male characters, and is mechanically adept and mends her car at one point using her hairpin. She seems to have designed and built all those gadgets she uses to put on her make-up while she's driving, which takes serious brains and skill and puts her in the same league as Professor Pat Pending. She's ditzy and she loves pink and silly girly stuff, but there's nothing wrong with being a girly girl. On occasion she is the damsel in distress who calls for help and gets rescued, but it doesn't happen that often, and in fact, Dick Dastardly ends up in a mess and calling for help more often than she does (Muttley, DO something!).
And Dick Dastardly and Muttley, what can I say? Some people would dismiss Dick as being just a generic villain with a moustache, but he goes much deeper than that. He and Muttley have a real camaraderie, despite they way they treat each other. Dastardly is shown at one point begrudgingly tickling Muttley, and Muttley is faultlessly loyal to his master (to the point that in one race where he gets left behind following a successful act of sabotage on another competitor, he desperately runs after the Mean Machine and tries to climb back on board, damaging the car in the process). Dastardly, far from being a born loser, is a competent and reasonably intelligent character who drives the best car in the race, and of course the running joke is that he spends every episode putting his foot down to generate an enormous lead so that he can stop and lay excessively elaborate traps that go wrong for him, and ultimately loses for that reason. He's something akin to a tragic hero in this respect (or at least a tragicomic antivillain) and this is the reason why Wacky Races is rather more complicated than a lot of people give it credit for. It's hard not to feel sympathy for Dastardly and Muttley and hope that they might win just one race, but also easy to laugh at them when they lose again.
Peter Perfect might look like a stereotypical hero, and he never cheats, and is chivalrous and kindhearted and keen to help Penelope Pitstop (and Dick Dastardly as well and probably anyone else in a mess), but he's also a bit of a pansy and not that skilled a driver, and the running joke is that his 'Turbo Terrific' frequently falls to pieces, usually to his utterance of quaint euphemistic expletives such as 'Fiddlesticks!'
Rufus Ruffcut is a musclebound lumberjack with a pet beaver, but manages not to fall into the trap of being portrayed as all muscle and no brain. He's not above underhand tactics, but he is shown to have quite a strong sense of fair play and will intervene if he thinks someone is abusing an advantage.
Pat Pending is an inventor and sometimes helps out other competitors and foils Dastardly's schemes. He cheats almost as much as Dastardly himself, although his methods tend to be less dangerous, not that it seems to matter much considering the physics of explosives and their negligible effect on human anatomy in this particular cartoon.
The Ant Hill Mob are seven dwarf Noo Yoick gangsters in a 1920s car (oddly named presumably after the Lavender Hill Mob, a film about London crooks pulling off a heist). They frequently break away from the race by trying to escape the police, but help out people they find in trouble.
The Slag Brothers, the Gruesome Twosome, and the Army Surplus Special are more stereotyped and less developed, with the Slags being two cavemen overwhelmed with body hair in a car made out of rocks, and the gruesome being a small vampire creature and a Frankenstein's monster in a hearse with a dragon in the roof. The Army Surplus are two soldiers in a tank.
The last two who are also pretty undeveloped and probably haven't aged well are Red Max, a German WW1 pilot in a car that looks like a Fokker, and an elderly impoverished redneck called just 'Luke' driving a car cobbled together out of his kitchen furniture with a live bear on it.
With Disney apparently redoing all their old cartoons there seems to have been an interest in recent years in film companies attempting to resurrect Wacky Races or the characters in it. A 2020 Scooby Doo film cast Dick Dastardly as a super villain, the villain being pretty cool in himself but looking more like Red Max than Dastardly and dissimilar in character, missing the point that the character's pathological addiction to cheating was his downfall. An attempt in 2017 to remake the original disappointingly omitted most of the original characters and ruined the ones it did use by stereotyping them, changing Peter Perfect into a dumb, vain jock, Penelope Pitstop into an obnoxious Mary Sue by removing her likable character flaw of bumbling dizziness in the name of anti-girly-girl bowdlerisation, . Even more ironically and disappointingly it had even worse violence than the original, with not only cartoon explosives but more disturbing, nonsensical, and not at all amusing violence mainly inflicted on Dastardly not as a result of his own actions, such as a character in one episode incessantly punching him in the face and him being tied up and beaten with sticks by a mob in another. I would love to see the original recreated in modern higher-budgeted animation in a way that does justice to what the characters and idea originally were, but after what I've seen I'm not hopeful for it.