Heck, this is a franchise where a couple of carjacking mechanics have gone to space. After years and years of jokes about Fast & Furious going to space (the 21st-century equivalent of all the jokes about Rocky Balboa running out of opponents on Earth and fighting a Martian), the series actually sent Roman and Tej into the cosmos in a tricked-out spaceship car.
But the movies look tame and grounded and semi-realistic compared to the bonkers cartoon spinoff. Fast & Furious Spy Racers ran for six seasons on Netflix between 2019 and 2021, when the gap between Hobbs & Shaw and the COVID-delayed F9 had caused a drought in the Fast & Furious onslaught of content, and it really hit the spot.
Fast & Furious Spy Racers Is Even Wilder Than The Movies
The premise of Fast & Furious Spy Racers goes back to basics and harks back to the original movie, as a team of teenage street racers are recruited to infiltrate a criminal gang. But once it gets going, Spy Racers becomes even more absurd and far-fetched than the film franchise it’s based on.
Co-creator Bret Haaland had previously turned a couple of DreamWorks’ animated movie franchises into TV shows with The Penguins of Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, and he was the perfect man for the job. He recognized that, while they’re technically in live-action (with a hefty dose of CGI layered on top) the Fast & Furious movies are just as cartoonish as the Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda movies, and he really leaned into that cartoonishness.
When a Fast & Furious movie wants to go to space or spend 20 minutes speeding through miles and miles of airport runway, the filmmakers have to at least come up with a way to make it look realistic on-camera. But when Haaland came up with a crazy idea for Spy Racers, like a supernatural mask that gives its wearer god-like powers, he didn’t have to even try to make it seem realistic.
Spy Racers introduced all kinds of wacky concepts to the Fast & Furious canon: animal sidekicks, cars driving underwater, a backpack that defies gravity, a new type of drag race involving VR goggles, a 007-style gadget that can render people and cars invisible, and ghost-hunting gizmos not unlike the proton packs used in Ghostbusters. It’s insane.
Spy Racers Has A Higher RT Score Than Any Of The Fast & Furious Films
On Rotten Tomatoes, Fast & Furious Spy Racers has garnered an impressive critics’ score of 86%, which is higher than any of the Fast & Furious movies. The very best films have come close to achieving that number — Furious 7 sits at 81%, Fast Five sits at 77% — but Spy Racers reigns supreme by a slim margin of 5%.
As much fun as the Fast & Furious movies are, it’s nothing compared to the animated series. Spy Racers makes the Fast & Furious movies look like the Bourne movies. It translates the inherent cartoonishness of an action movie franchise where regular people are practically invincible and military-grade tanks are pedestrian vehicles to the actual cartoon medium.
If you’ve grown disillusioned with the repetitiveness of the recent Fast & Furious films, Spy Racers could be just the ticket to renew your interest in the franchise. It’s much more creative and inspired than the last couple of movies have been.