Vin Diesel's Fast & Furious franchise has been growing quicker than anyone could have predicted twenty years ago. The series of films are so popular, in fact, that an animated show from Dreamworks was developed to help flesh out the universe and other members of the Torreto family.
Fast & Furious: Spy Racers explores the challenges that face younger racers who aren't quite as talented as Dom and the others are in the mainline movies, in order to help bring the franchise to younger audiences who may not have been alive when The Fast and the Furious was released way back in 2001. The series has been going for so long now that a third season is set to hit Netflix for the holidays, which will take the world of Fast & Furious to the desert.
The aptly titled Sahara will be available tomorrow for kids to binge during their time off of school. In anticipation of the release, we spoke exclusively with the showrunners. Both Avatar: The Last Airbender's Tim Hedrick and Futurama's Bret Haaland joined us to explain a bit of the process behind choosing and building the car models that end up in the show.
Bret shared the following with us about why and how the cars are chosen for the show.
"It was a lot of fun to try to make cars that look like real cars but can get past the legal challenges. Layla's car, for example, is my favorite. It's almost like a Nissan or classic Datsun, but we changed it enough. It also reminds me of a certain Toyota I remember in a James Bond movie when I was a kid. And then, of course, Tony's car is a muscle car, but it's not any muscle car that's on the street. And of course, as a kid who used to play with toy cars, there's always that fantasy of what would happen if we, or somebody, actually made this car? I would love to see this car driving around Hollywood or something. So it's fun.
When we conceived the show, we had an idea that Tony would have this classic kind of Toretto style muscle car, that Layla would have kind of her version. We wanted the electric car; we wanted Cisco's truck. We knew that we wanted them all to be kind of character-specific. But then when you bring in the professionals, what they add is, I mean, it's kind of, it's amazing, the finishes on the inside and like, well actually if you were building a car like this, the way it would be in the back and they give you all of these specifics."
Hear our full conversation with Tim Hedrick (Avatar, Voltron) and Bret Haaland (Futurama, The Simpsons) using the podcast player below. We've also included the trailer and synopsis for Fast & Furious Spy Racers: Sahara, so be sure to share your thoughts in the usual spot!
*This interview has been edited for clarity.*
When Ms. Nowhere and Gary disappear while on a mission in the Sahara, the Spy Racers must step up to the plate and finish what Ms. Nowhere started. Get ready to speed under the Saharan sun in the all-new season of Fast & Furious: Spy Racers.
Dreamworks' Fast & Furious Spy Racers: Sahara will be available on Netflix on December 26th.