Netflix has revealed the first-look images and cast for its upcoming animated series, Fast & Furious: Spy Racers. The street-racing family drama turned-international thriller franchise is getting a CGI animated spin-off show, and it’s set to begin streaming on December 26. A teaser trailer was released earlier this year.
Fast & Furious: Spy Racers will be executive produced by franchise leading man Vin Diesel, writer Chris Morgan, and producer Neal H Mortiz, who have collaborated on every film since 2009’s Fast and Furious. Joining them are Dreamworks showrunners Tim Hendrick (Voltron Legendary Defender) and Bret Haaland (All Hail King Julien). This will be the pair’s first project based on a PG-13 franchise, as Dreamworks’ previous Netflix spin-offs have kept in the realm of the company’s popular animated titles until now.
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The plot of the show will follow Tony Toretto, teen cousin of franchise lead Dom Toretto (Diesel), as he and his friends are recruited by the government to infiltrate an international racing league run by an evil crime syndicate named SH1FT3R, who is bent on ruling the world. The cast will feature the voices of Tyler Posey (star of MTV’s Teen Wolf) as Tony, Camille Ramsey (American Vandal) as a famous street racer named Layla Gray, Luke Youngblood (Harry Potter) as 13-year old tech prodigy Frostee Benson, Charlet Chung (Overwatch) as artist/spy Echo, and Jorge Diaz (Jane The Virgin) as kindhearted muscleman Cisco Renaldo. You can check out the first images from Fast & Furious: Spy Racers in the gallery below, along with the official poster.
This is all part of an initiative by Universal to mold the Fast & Furious series into a larger multimedia franchise to presumably compete with the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Just this year, the studio unveiled the first of many planned sequels and spin-offs, the Dwayne Johnson/Jason Stratham vehicle Hobbs And Shaw, which expanded on the world of the films in ways the main series couldn’t. In addition to this animated Spy Racers spinoff, Hobbs & Shaw director David Leitch hopes to get a live-action Fast & Furious series off of the ground sometime in the near future.
For now, only time will tell if Fast & Furious: Spy Racers can recreate the spectacle and excitement of its home franchise for a younger audience, but the credentials of the people involved in production are a promising start. Voltron: Legendary Defender was a great installment of the much-beloved Voltron franchise, and All Hail King Julien remains a popular staple of Netflix’s animated library, so it’s safe to say the show is in good hands. In addition, the plot seems to invoke the later movies with the team going up against an international crime organization, yet the focus on racing harkens back to the franchise’s early days. With luck, fans might get the best of both worlds when the series streams this December.
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Source: Netflix