A Musical Note: Speed Racer, "Let Us Drink Milk"

The Speed Racer movie was, as I've written elsewhere, one of the biggest surprises of my moviegoing life. I expected it to be TERRIBLE. Instead, it was one of the best family films I've ever seen, ridiculously larger than life yet still able to hit key emotional notes in its main story, and with what I have often called one of the greatest final fight scenes of any movie -- even though, technically, it's not a fight, it's a race. 

The soundtrack was also fantastic, taking cues from the original soundtrack of Speed Racer/Mach Go Go Go!, but lushly orchestrated and developed by Michael Giacchino (who also did the fabulous soundtrack for The Incredibles). 

This particular piece of music comes at the end of the movie, when Speed has won the Grand Prix and is in the Winner's Circle to celebrate (and yes, drink milk, which I'm pretty sure was a reference to the censorship of American TV, where no alcoholic drink can make an appearance in a kid's show). But it also shows Racer X looking down, and shows what we have suspected: that he really is Speed's older brother Rex, after faking his death and getting his face changed in his quest to bring down the corrupt. Rex is offered the chance to go down and join his family, but turns it down. Then we return to the celebration and the triumph of a family and their bond.

For my writing, this is another piece associated with Sun Wu Kung, following his win of his own race in Challenges of the Deeps. He is about to celebrate and is then accused of, somehow, cheating -- and demands that the Arena show his accusers the truth that makes him who he is -- the truth of Hyperion. And it does, in a brief but stunning series of images. The accusers drop their accusations, and Wu Kung is free to accept his prize -- and give it to those he won it for.