David Kronke: He's gainin' on you so you better look alive

A couple of weeks after a screed about certified, before-a-dime-is-spent bomb “Dallas,� a film version of the TV show, comes this even dumber announcement/rumor: that the Wachowski brothers, auteurs of the “Matrix� trilogy and “V for Vendetta,� are preparing a movie based on the ’60s manga TV show “Speed Racer.�

The link jests endlessly at certain gender issues of the writing-directing-producing team, yet scarcely addresses the idiocy of the project itself. “Speed Racer� was a cheap show with crappy animation but a fairly peppy theme song – does that really make it worthy of Hollywood’s big-budget, tent-pole treatment? I knew someone who worked a couple of years on trying to develop “Astroboy� – a similar if arguably better-known entity – into a feature, only to abandon the project.

Honestly: What can the Wachowskis bring to a pretty simple, stupid concept that will justify somewhere between $50 and $100 million in bringing it to the big screen? (And, of course, there’d be 10s of millions of more bucks spent trying to revive interest in a show that cost an hilariously ironic fraction of all of this.) And aren’t the Wachowskis more visionary than this, than to transform a pretty-much-forgotten cartoon into an obviously manufactured media event?

And what great insights might they subversively attempt to bring into such a project? That Speed Racer is a pawn of the proletariat? Hell, anyone who’d even be duped by studio propagandizing into considering seeing such a film is a pawn of the proletariat.

So if you’re ever asked, as Neo was in “The Matrix,� to consume “the red pill or the blue pill?�, your answer is clear: Isn’t there a purple pill? A green pill? Some pill that’ll direct me far away from the pseudo-philosophical-crap-that’ll-lead-to-shockingly-puerile-garbage-that-the-system-is-clearly-leading-me-to?