Initial D is a street racer’s wet dream.

Initial D. Battle 1, Akina’s Downhill Specialist. Battle 2, Challenge: Red Suns. Battle 3, Challenge: Night Kids. Battle 4, Myogi’s Downhill Technician. Battle 5, Duct Tape Death Match. Battle 6, The Terror of Mt. Usui. V.7-14, further titles to be determined.
TV & OAV series (41 episodes), 1998-2001. Director: Shin Misawa. V.1-13, 3 episodes/150 minutes; v.14, 2 episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $19.99. Distributor: TOKYOPOP.

Initial D will leave you feeling that the whole world revolves around teen street racers like in the 2001 movie The Fast and the Furious. Gunma Province is the mountainous region overlooking the Kanto (Tokyo-Yokohama) basin; an area of small tourist resort towns. There is little for teens living there to do but race their cars along the twisty roads. Tak is an 18-year-old student working part-time at a gas station at the foot of Mt. Akina, along with his high school buddy Itsuki and 21-year-old Koichiro, the leader of the Akina Speed Stars gang. Itsuki is obsessed with joining the Speed Stars, while Tak doesn’t see why racing is such a big deal. What Tak has never considered worth mentioning is that he has been using his dad’s car for the last five years to make early-morning deliveries to the hotels atop Mt. Akina, and racing home to get some sleep before school; so to him driving is nothing special. But when rival teams from nearby mountain towns — the Akagi Red Suns, the Myogi Night Kids — begin dissing the Speed Stars, Tak reluctantly allows his pals to talk him into helping save their reputation.

Initial D is a street racer’s wet dream. Tak’s father and his gas-station boss were street racers in their teens, and they push him into joining the Speed Stars so they can relive their lost youth through him. The series goes through the sports formula escalation of easy rivals to tough rivals in specialized racing cars; honorable opponents to those who cheat to win; local opponents to racers coming from afar to challenge “the Downhill Specialist who never loses”; gangsters who try to fix races; temptations to turn pro. Tak wins at first because he has had five years’ experience driving his father’s car along Mt. Akina’s roads, but how will he fare on a rival club’s roads? There are growing-up subplots: Tak belatedly discovers girls, and has to consider what to do when he graduates from high school.

Initial D began in 1996 as a serialized manga (by Shuichi Shigeno) with “realistic” (plain or ugly) people and beautifully-drawn automobiles. The animation (production credited to Prime Direction, OB Planning and Pastel) consists of similarly ugly character design for the 2D animated people and shiny CGI animation for the automobiles. The disparity between the 2D and 3D animation is deliberately jarring, and the cars in the racing scenes look less real than like realistic but idealized CGI video-game autos (are you surprised that there are Initial D video and collectable card games?).

This American Initial D release appeared as a 26-episode Japanese TV series broadcast April 18 to November 28, 1998; the 13-episode Initial D: Second Stage sequel, October 14, 1999 to January 6, 2000; and a two-episode Initial D: Extra Stage OAV series, released February 21, 2001. (It does not include the 2001 Initial D: Third Stage — The Movie anime theatrical feature.) The DVDs consist of three episodes doubled; both a “classic version” as originally shown in Japan, and a “tricked out version” with new American rock & rap music, Americanized names (Itsugi is Iggy; Koichiro is Cole; Natsuki is Natalie), and enhancement of the dramatic CGI racing scenes.