Fun for all the family: adapting the Fast & Furious as animated children's television

As the Fast & Furious franchise has grown in scale and scope, both in its storylines and as a force at the box office, so too has it grown as a transmedia franchise. Beginning in 2015, following the immense success of the fifth and sixth entries in the series, Fast & Furious has expanded its brand to encompass the kind of big-budget paratextual offshoots perhaps more commonly associated with franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Indeed, this period has seen the development and release of several such spinoffs, including Fast & Furious: Supercharged, a theme park attraction, Fast & Furious Live, a touring stunt show, and Fast & Furious: Spy Racers, an animated series created by DreamWorks Animation for Netflix that first aired in 2019. Following the adventures of a gang of young racers led by Tony Toretto, the teenaged cousin of the films’ protagonist, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto, Spy Racers presents viewers with a new set of storylines which ostensibly take place in the same fictional world as the live-action movies. This chapter will explore the various ways in which Spy Racers adapts the Fast films in order to satisfy, and take advantage of, the unique conditions of television, animation, and children’s media. In doing so, it will frame Spy Racers in terms of a decades-old tradition of film-to-TV animated adaptations, as well as examining how the show’s implementation of transmedia storytelling exemplifies a uniquely contemporary approach to franchising.