Initial D

[Seil]

What is it? The Fast And The Furious with awesome techno music? Is it an anime? A band? WAAAAAHHHHG!

[Regulus Tera]

Initial D (頭文字(イニシャル)D, Inisharu Dī?) is a manga by Shuichi Shigeno which has been serialized in Kodansha's Young Magazine since 1995. It has been adapted into a long-running anime series by Pastel, Studio Gallop, and OP Planning, which premiered in Japan on Fuji TV and Animax, and a live action film by Avex and Media Asia. Both the manga and anime series were licensed for distribution in North America by Tokyopop.

The anime and manga focus on the world of illegal Japanese street racing, where all the action is concentrated in the mountain passes and never in cities nor urban areas, and the drift racing style is emphasized in particular. Keiichi Tsuchiya helps with editorial supervision. The story is centered around the Japanese prefecture of Gunma, more specifically on several mountains in the prefecture and in and their surrounding cities and towns. Although some of the names of the locations the characters race in have been fictionalized, all of the locations in the series are based on actual locations in Gunma Prefecture.

So it's like Speed Racer... but XTREME!!!

[Ryong]

So it's like Speed Racer... but XTREME!!!

Isn't Speed Racer already XTREME!!! Or, at least, tryng to be? Like, all the time?

[Demetrius]

I enjoyed all of them, and I'm hoping they'll keep making them.

<---Drift Junkie!

[Seil]

All I can say is look into the music. If you're into techno, then you'll be into this stuff.

[TopHatAssassin]

I think it's all of those things, and more! I saw a (the?) live-action movie once on tv, and it looked really cool! Mostly for the close-up of the engine while the guy was racing, and it was all hot and the pistons were all firing and going so fast, it was awesome. And then the one time they seized up 'cause he was going too fast and it was "WAGH!" and he lost, but it was in one of the coolest ways possible.

[Warumono]

I like the game, the music is alright. It reminds me of Eurobeat, which I can only stand for a few minutes before going insane.
The cool thing is that you can buy a card out of the game that saves your car stats and upgrades and stuff. I still have my RX-8 card somewhere >.>

[Xaeta]

Initial D. is a popular manga about street racing in Japan - particularly the drift/grip scene that takes place in touge ("toe-gay" mountain passes). It follows how Takumi Fujiwara goes from a tofu delivery kid to one of the best racers in his prefecture and Japan. You could say that it helped inspire writing "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."
Takumi's the son of Bunta Fujiwara who was the best driver in the Gunma prefecture until he had his son. Bunta gave Takumi his car the AE86 Sprinter Trueno (hachi-roku) which has been perfectly tuned for drift and downhill races. Since Takumi was 13, he was delivering to a hotel on Mt. Akina (a perilous touge legendary for it's 5 consecutive hairpins), and early every morning he drives faster and faster down the mountain 'accidentally' discovering how to drift. He is challenged by local street racers from other mountains and learns what it means to be a street racer.
Compared to America, rarely to they actually race on the streets, sticking only to touge. And instead of racing for money, all the racers take on each other for a powerful sense of pride.
Takumi starts learning about racer pride, and joins up into the team known as Project D led by his former rival Ryosuke and his brother Keisuke. They travel around Gunma and most of Japan beating all the local record holders.


What they DON'T tell you is that Initial D. is actually a parallel story of one of the most famous people in the drift world. Keiichi Tsuchiya (a.k.a. the Drift King) is who the story of paralleled of. He learned all his driving techniques as a street racer and from driving up and down touge in his AE86 doing deliveries for his family business when he first got a license and car. It is implied in the anime (not manga) that Keiichi and Bunta are old friends; and Keiichi is also the main technical consultant for the series.

A similar series - Over Rev! - also covers street racing but follows a girl named Ryouko who is inspired to get into street racing and all the harsh difficulties that actually exist including (1) buying the car, (2) getting gas, (3) actually FIXING the car, and (4) leading a double life between school and her driving career. It's a change in style from Initial D., but the two follow the same premise.