My Summer Lair Chapter #349: Does Your Heart Race When You Talk About Your Family?
25 years of living life a quarter mile at a time is wild. When you rewatch the first Fast and Furious movie, you can’t Oracle-see anything that is going to come.
You don’t see the dense—and arguably messy—continuity that properly kicks off with the third movie: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. #JusticeForHan would effortlessly create a number of unique narrative threads that would arc into the next several Fast movies.
Watch The Fast and the Furious in 2001 and it’s impossible to glimpse the epic productions and daring heists. This was 2001…Dom and his crew hijacked a semi-truck carrying Panasonic TV/VCR combos and DVD players. Seriously?! (In their defense the movie swore the haul was worth $1.2 million. Okay, fine.)
There’s no bold foreshadowing like an MCU movie end credits teaser. The first Fast movie is fun…a slightly polished B-Movie, almost a Point Break remake: A cop goes undercover to infiltrate a gang of criminals with an extreme hobby and gets too close to them. (Point Break is fresh!)
And thanks to director Rob Cohen’s deft work a passionate audience got too close to that first Fast movie.
The Fast and the Furious connected with the correct demographic and made enough money to make a second one. And then a third movie…and it’s off to the races for pink slips.
Fast and Furious 4, 5 and 6 are king.
The final…ish?? Fast and Furious movie will be released on March 17, 2028.
Still, for now, 25 years later…we gotta recognize and celebrate the astonishing transformation of this grand saga.
“25 years. Eight directors. Countless writers, crew members, performers, each one giving something real to a saga that has outlasted trends, cynics, and time itself,” Vin Diesel wrote on Instagram on March 21, 2026. “That doesn’t happen by accident…It happens because people show up and pour themselves into something bigger than any one individual.”
This My Summer Lair episode is like those delicious BBQs that conclude most Fast movies: where all the friends and family gather together.
I’m talking grace with the Globe and Mail’s film critic Barry Hertz about Fast and Furious.
Barry is the author of a propulsive biography: Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World.
Welcome to the Family is a turbo-charged deep-dive into the ego-laced history, impressive impact and unbelievable behind-the-scenes frenzied chaos of the Fast & Furious franchise.
Barry’s Welcome to the Family which smoothly combines cultural analysis with top notch reporting―he interviewed over 170 creative individuals related to the film franchise―isn’t just about fast cars and legendary physics-defying jumps.
Welcome to the Family remarkably details how a scrappy street-racing movie evolved into a billion-dollar theology.
A global religion fueled by Corona, carburetors, and the word family spoken with the raw emotional intensity of Shakespeare.
In this MSL conversation, Barry and I go under the hood of the balls-to-the-wall franchise—chasing the reinventions, the cultural impact and why these magical movies continue to resonate since that quirky first B-movie 25 years ago.
Enjoy this zippy conversation with Barry Hertz, talking about his Fast and Furious book Welcome to The Family.
Raise your Corona and toast Barry, his incredible Fast and Furious biography and to Gen X: the defiant architects of so much of our best pop culture.
Barry Hertz @ W• T • F
Host Sammy Younan
Recorded: Monday, January 30, 2026 at 10:30 am (EST)
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