ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 10, 1996 TAG: 9608120027
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
After winning automobile races on television for 30 years, Speed Racer is now tasting commercial celebrity.
The animated hero of the 1960s-era cartoon series, Speed Racer has been moonlighting this summer in commercials for Volkswagen and ESPN, the sports cable network.
He joins an expanding cast of cartoon characters who have been turning up in advertising in recent years. The characters give advertisers a celebrity without the risks associated with real people. They also carry some nostalgic appeal for viewers who may have grown up watching them.
The Peanuts gang of comic strip characters such as Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy have appeared for years in ads for Metropolitan Life.
Nike has used Bugs Bunny in ads with basketball star Michael Jordan. And Pepsi drafted Wile E. Coyote for a commercial with football star Deion Sanders.
``The cartoon characters never say anything bad about your product,'' said Dave Vadehra, who heads Video Storyboard Tests Inc., which gauges consumer response to commercials. ``You find the one who fits your image, and they will do everything you want them to.''
The downside, he said, is that the most popular characters command licensing fees that can exceed what it may cost to sign a live celebrity.
The advertisers and owners of the rights to Speed Racer declined to say how much it cost to use the cartoon hero.
Volkswagen of America features Speed Racer in a 30-second commercial that debuted last month for its sporty GTI model. Speed finds his Special Formula Mach 5 race car has been sabotaged, but accepts an offer to drive the GTI instead to yet another victory.
The ad is part of the German-owned car company's ``Drivers Wanted'' campaign that attempts to show its cars appeal to active people who like to drive.
``A good part of our target market are people in their 20s and 30s who grew up with Speed Racer,'' said Ron Lawner, chief creative officer for Arnold Communications, the Boston-based ad agency that created the ad for Volkswagen.
The Speed Racer cartoon series was produced in 1966 in Japan and was imported to the U.S. a year later, said Jim Rocknowski, executive vice president of Speed Racer Enterprises Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., the owner of the U.S. program rights and license.
He said there were 52 original episodes in the series in which Speed often has to overcome villains and dishonest rivals en route to victory. It ran almost continuously in the United States through 1986, he said.
Rocknowski and his father obtained the series rights in 1991 and made a deal with cable network MTV to run it the next year. More recently, The Cartoon Network cable channel has been carrying the series.
Lawner said he proposed using the character last year when his agency competed for the Volkswagen advertising account. ``Speed is the ultimate driver, and we wanted to do a driver's campaign,'' he said.
After securing the rights, the agency hired an animation company that designed the GTI commercial. ``They tried to stay true to the original, right down to the bad dubbing where mouths move after the words have stopped,'' Lawner said.
Steve Wilhite, Volkswagen's senior marketing executive, said the car company also has developed a poster for Volkswagen showrooms and brochures using Speed Racer.
ESPN has been using original Speed Racer animation from the series along with real drivers and officials for an ad campaign that started in May to drum up viewership for its NASCAR race telecasts.
Judy Fearing, senior vice president for consumer marketing at ESPN, said the cable network is particularly interested in getting people in their mid 30s to early 40s to watch the races. ``Very few of these people didn't see Speed Racer'' when they were growing up, she said.
In the ESPN ads, the drivers and race officials act as if Speed Racer is actually competing. In one ad, drivers including Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon comment on Speed's racing abilities; in another ad, race officials agonize over whether the Mach 5 should be allowed on the track.
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Jeff Gordon's wife sees a resemblance to her husbandby CNB- maybe it's that both are succeeding not only on the track, but
also as product spokesmen.