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est-grossing film that summer and the year’s second top box office draw (behind “Rain Man”). This seedy drawing of Tinseltown took inspiration from film noir, and its story was set in the golden age of Hollywood studios, many of which were then in decline.

In this world, humans live next to their animated counterparts; Donald Duck and Daffy Duck perform as a dueling piano act in a nightclub where Betty Boop works as a cigarette girl; and the film’s unlikely heroes are a comically mismatched pair: a hardboiled detective, Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), grieving his brother’s murder, and a hyperactive toon, Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer), who has been falsely accused of murder. Eddie and Roger’s search for the truth uncovers a web of conspiracies fit for movies such as “Chinatown,” “The Maltese Falcon” or “L.A. Confidential.” In a precursor of the many blockbusters to come, Hoskins acted out his scenes without Roger Rabbit, who would later be drawn in postproduction (much like today’s CGI characters).

Christopher Lloyd, as the villain Judge Doom, gives a fearsome performance augmented by animated flourishes, like when his eyes pop out into cartoon daggers. The shark in “Jaws” and the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” were made to look real, but even in its animated unreality, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” managed to scare a fair amount of viewers.

It must have been a licensing nightmare to bring all those Looney Tunes and other cartoon characters into the frame. Not to mention the film’s stunning technical achievements in merging the cartoon world with the real one. With a budget of about $70 million (about $150 million in today’s dollars), it was one of the most expensive movies to be made at the time.

Although folding animation into reality is as old as Walt Disney’s “Alice Comedies” and Max Fleischer’s Koko the Clown of the 1920s, Zemeckis made it seem as if the animated characters interacted with the physical world. Hollywood will likely never make a movie that looks like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” again. Why spend millions of dollars getting the hand-drawn characters just right when a computer can fix things in a click? —

Even if you don’t believe that “Speed” is the greatest of all summer action-athons, consider that it might be the purest. It became a gargantuan word-of-mouth success without relying on stars. Though Keanu Reeves wasn’t an unknown in 1994, he hardly had the marquee cachet of a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone, and many of us remember the movie as Sandra Bullock’s breakout. Instead, its appeal rested in the visceral simplicity of a premise — bus can’t brake — that invites an hour of constant motion and mayhem. And that’s not counting the elevator and subway bookends.

To the extent that “Speed” relies on special effects (the 50-foot gap in the freeway was an illusion), they are not themselves the draw, like dinosaurs or aliens. The stakes and dangers are tangible to anyone who’s been in a vehicle. Directing his first feature, veteran cinematographer Jan de Bont employs real locations and — to a non-Angeleno, at least — a broadly followable sense of geography. Beyond the mindblowing difficulty of maintaining continuity, the reliance on civic infrastructure grounds “Speed” in time and place, making it an experiment that is difficult to repeat. A reboot wouldn’t necessarily have a brand-new, unopened freeway, the 105, to play with.

The irresistibility of “Speed” relies on its blend of ingenuity (the progression of obstacles of traffic and physics) and meatheadedness (at one point, Dennis Hopper’s bombmaking villain, Howard Payne, actually wonders aloud if a decision was “a little hammy”). It never fails to give me chills when Payne, on the phone with Reeves’ Jack Traven, tells him, “There’s a bomb on a bus,” and the camera closes in on Hopper’s face, accompanied by a little boom from Mark Mancina’s score.

Their conversation makes no sense: “There are rules, Jack.” Why are there rules? Where it counts, “Speed” is a model of wit and symmetry. And while “Speed” shouldn’t get much credit for social commentary, note that in this post-1992 riots production, passengers regard the LAPD warily.

But who cares about substance, really, when “Speed” has you holding your breath, 26 years later, as Bullock puts on the bus’s turn signal for a wide right?

Not long ago, talk of masks conjured one precise image in my mind: a snot green face, bald as a ball of Play-Doh, contorted into a roguish smile. And Jim Carrey was the man behind “The Mask,” that deranged comedy about a spineless bank clerk named Stanley Ipkiss who, upon donning an ancient mask, finds his most wanton appetites unleashed.

The movie was the highest grossing of Carrey’s three blockbusters in 1994 — the others were “Dumb and Dumber” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” — and all three helped catapult Carrey to goofball stardom. The story also ushered in what would become Carrey’s signature part: the dual role of straight man and loony maniac.

This binary form befits a movie that takes cartoons as its model. Directed by Chuck Russell, “The Mask” was based on a

Dark Horse comic, and its special effects (overseen by Industrial Light and Magic) are all googly eyeballs and lolling tongues, steamrollered torsos and twirling blurs. The movie pays overt homage to Looney Tunes: Pictures of Porky Pig and the Tasmanian Devil adorn Ipkiss’ apartment and, in one scene, he even plays a videotape of Tex Avery’s “Screwball Classics 2.”

A year after sitting through the gritty nihilism of one of last year’s blockbusters, “Joker,” I found rewatching “The Mask” to be refreshing. In his yellow zoot suit, Ipkiss is less a doom-and-gloom antihero than a child of Avery’s animated golden age, and his world — a made-up city where the grooviest nightclub plays swing music — reflects his 1940s flair. The movie also offered a debut role to Cameron Diaz, who, as a blonde bombshell love interest, is as heavily ogled as Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood. —