Okay, so here’s the premise: It’s a rally race, and the racers are wacky.

Are you still with me? Okay.

Hanna-Barbera made 17 episodes of this show with that very simple premise in mind. It was pure insanity, but you like insanity in your cartoons, don’t you? Of course you do. There was one clear theme across every episode, and it’s that the villains (Dick Dastardly and his dog Muttley) spent every episode trying to sabotage the other racers, only for their plans to backfire. Dastardly and Muttley were by far the funnest characters on the show, but let’s not forget the other 10 racers on the show.

Peter Perfect was your typical hero archetype guy, driving a phallic race car he named the Turbo Terrific. He was the most straight-forward racer on the show, and wasn’t opposed to lending a hand to his opponents when they were in distress. He lost more times that you’d think.

No, he’s not trying to compensate for a small penis at all…

Rufus Ruffcut was a lumberjack driving a car made entirely out of wood. That doesn’t sound too wacky until you realize his sidekick is a beaver named Sawtooth who sat there eating pieces of the car the whole time.

Next was the Army Surplus Special, which was literally a tank driven by two soldiers who weren’t shy about shooting other cars on the track.

My second favorite car on the show was the one driven by the Ant-Hill Mob. They were seven dwarf mobsters in pinstripe suits driving an old bulletproof hooptie. They later appeared on the spin-off series about Penelope Pitstop.

Penelope Pitstop was a southern belle dressed in pink with a dainty little pink car that contained gadgets that automatically put on make-up for her. She wouldn’t become the least bit interesting until she got her own spin-off show.

Why Women Shouldn’t Drive

Professor Pat Pending was an inventor whose car looked like a frankensteinian construction made from a car, motorboat, and an old airplane. He was always converting the car into a pure airplane and flying over the competition.

The Bouldermobile was driven by two cavemen who looked not unlike Captain Caveman.

The Creepy Coupe was a miniature haunted house mounted on wheels, complete with its own thunder cloud and a dragon hidden in the belfry.

The Red Max was like a parody of the Red Baron. He didn’t have a car so much as he had an airplane, and it had a machine gun mounted on the front that he’d use to shoot other racers.

The Arkansas Chug-a-bug was a steam-powered jalopy driven by a hillbilly and a bear.

Finally, there was Dastardly and Muttley. Dastardly and Muttley were simultaneously the antagonists and protagonists of the series. They were the villains, but nobody else in this cast was half interesting enough to carry the show on their own. They were also, by far, the dumbest flipping idiots to ever cheat in a race. Here’s how a typical race would go for this: They pull way ahead of every other racer, set up a booby trap, lie in wait for the trap to spring, and then have the trap backfire in their faces after every other driver has passed them up. Did you catch what they did wrong? They had a car that was fast enough to leave every other racer in the dust, but they wasted their time by setting traps. No only that, but they stayed behind to see if their traps were sprung rather than pulling further ahead.

And why exactly were they the villains? Everyone else was cheating but Peter Perfect and Penelope. Others were shooting military grade weapons, doing drive-bys, breathing fire, swinging clubs, and flying over one another all the time. Yet somehow Dastardly and Muttley took last place in every episode because their methods of cheating were a tad more Machiavellian. Maybe they would’ve walked away with a few wins under the belts if they resorted to throwing explosives out the window.

Wacky Races lasted for one season on TV, but its legacy lived on with two spin-offs: The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Both spin-offs were pretty good, and I’d say a little bit funnier than Wacky Races. Still, if you’ve got the Boomerang network, you can catch Wacky Races every night around prime time and in the wee hours of the morn.