(triumphant music)
(perilous music) (engine revving)
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- Every time I go to watch a movie, it's very, very simple
in terms of how I determine that it's good, okay?
Does it have good depth?
Example, Arrival, great movie, okay?
Does it have plot twists and real risk?
Do good people die, okay?
Attack on Titan, okay?
And does it feel like the producer
tried to value my time while encouraging smart thinking,
and insane sound design, great music, Hans Zimmer.
(intense music)
- Well this little maneuver's gonna cost us 51 years!
- Interstellar.
When you take all that away, you're pretty much
left with the exact opposite type of movie, it seems like,
which is street racing movies.
Now, outside of Ford v Ferrari,
which is more of just like a historical movie,
I'm not really sure what exactly the industry
has been doing with making movies
for people like you and people like me, all right?
I'm Alex, Alex.FI on Instagram,
and today we're gonna be talking about
why even one of our favorite, original, family guy
is now driving cars in space.
I'm gonna be really honest.
When I watched the movie and I saw the car in space,
that's when I determined this is just not for me anymore.
I love the actors, I love the people in the movie,
but I just, we can't do space racing, okay?
Today, ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna be talking about
just what exactly happened to street racing movies.
(upbeat techno music)
They actually put a car in space.
I don't even know what to do with that information.
Now before we get into the Fiero flying rocket ship,
don't forget to subscribe, and of course,
as you're getting the good old tax returns right about now,
you might be wondering what to do with it.
I'm gonna be really honest with you,
the answer is just to build your car, okay?
There's a lot of cool things
and responsible things that you could do.
You could build your car and it'd be super dope.
You could finally get a set of wheels and tires
that you're looking for, mounted and balanced for free,
shipped to your door from fitmentindustries.com.
And if you're looking at our own signature wheels,
the wheels that we made for you, check out our Novia wheels,
we can get them over to your door in seven days or less,
which is actually pretty dang cool.
I don't care what you say, it's awesome, all right?
And I'm gonna keep talking about it.
Be glad that it's not a Squarespace ad.
And if you haven't yet, drop your favorite
street racing movie in the comments below
so we can either judge or agree with you.
I would argue that the fourth Fast and the Furious
is the second best one outside of the original,
mostly just because the first one, it just always -
everything in the movie looks very warm.
Like the actors look like they're constantly sweating.
It's just a very uncomfortable time to watch a movie.
So what's the deal with street racing movies?
The first place we obviously look to are the original,
like The Fast and the Furious, the iconic movie
that had more questionable one-liners than Shrek,
and it would spawn the energy that I believe
the enthusiasts, the youth, needed to have, all right?
That they needed to have in the early 2000s
to actually look at an unreliable Mazda
and say, I really want that, and it did that.
110%, people like Sam, without a doubt, and me too,
can attribute some of the OG days of wanting to get into
the car scene to a movie like The Fast and the Furious.
And it could make you even want to have the cars
that you saw in those movies.
I would argue that, as you came out of the 90s
and into the early 2000s, that movie spawned
a lot of people wanting to jump into Japanese tuner cars.
Now, you had racing, you had hip hop music,
you had a relatively decent cast too,
and a story that was just believable enough
for people to wanna get into the automotive culture.
I mean, sure, they were jumping
from semis to cars and stealing VHS's,
but really at the end of the day,
it was like a mini heist street racing movie.
It was good, it was cheesy, and I'm gonna be honest,
if it's still playing on FX
when I'm at my mom's house, I'm gonna leave it on.
No, Speed Racer doesn't count in this story, okay?
And Crazy Race from 2003 can just go like, hide in a hole.
There's some really bad racing movies out there,
and I'm just not gonna talk about them.
But you had other movies try to spill out
past the iconic Fast and the Furious series,
which was like, they had, well, Born to Race from 2011.
A movie that I would say was decent,
had some relatable cars, and I would say
that the house race scene was fun.
The Subaru gettin' the check engine light, kind of funny.
And that movie had the foundation to deliver a movie
that people could get behind if hey owned a Subaru,
or if they were just jumping into the car scene.
Again, it was kind of relatable.
It was high school, it was Subarus and Chargers.
It was, you know, that sort of stuff.
The biggest thing was a quarter mile race at the end.
After 2010 passed and directors were running out
on how they could actually shoot
a quarter mile drag race scene
that didn't look like everything else,
something just inherently flipped,
like specifically at the 2010 mark.
But what exactly happened to racing movies,
and specifically street racing movies?
I mean, people were still around after 2010.
There were still great movies out there,
like Need for Speed from 2014, or Turbo from Pixar,
and I think that's about it.
So where did the street racing movies go?
Where did they die?
And why don't you ever see them anymore?
Because it's kinda sad that all the movies
that we do get to watch that are related
to street racing are kinda bad, they're not good.
Like, there's even horse movies that are better
than race car movies, okay?
Credit is due to Fast Five, because I would say
that that movie was sick and it was made in 2011.
And if you remember, there was actually very -
there was like, zero street racing in that film.
(record scratch)
- I got 100,000 says I can take you all
in the next quarter mile.
(police sirens) (cars revving)
- Yeah, owned you!
Owned you!
- But the Universal Pictures head, Adam Ferguson,
had clearly laid out to the people of the series
that that sort of street racing thing
was going to end with this movie,
the sunset of drifting, drag racing,
and nice underground hippity hoppity music,
because of nothing more than him saying
that there was a lack of community size
that would actually come to buy tickets
for a street racing movie.
Stating the question, putting together Fast Five was,
can we take it out of being a pure car culture movie
and bring it into an action franchise?
If these movies were still about street racing,
there would probably be a ceiling
on how many people would buy tickets.
I'm gonna be honest, most car people
are relatively extremely cheap.
Like if it was up to me, I would just go watch one movie
and then sneak into the other movie
because it would be cheap, but that's besides me.
And to be fair, the Fast Five movie was really good.
They brought the team together, all right?
They had Han, which was awesome.
They made it a little bit better of an actual movie,
gave it a little bit of depth, put some risk into it,
and damn, I don't care what you say,
the vault scene is a serious heater.
But it didn't have any street racing.
It didn't have no Bow Wow, it didn't have no Kid Rock, okay?
I want Tokyo Drift 2.
And I was a little bit sad
when there was an opportunity to race that blue GT3 RS,
and then they just completely skipped over it
because they knew they would've spanked its ass,
but that's all right.
And as the movies grew, so did the obscurity.
Why you're wondering why street racing movies
have started to go away
is because people just didn't really watch them.
Then there was a cap.
Racing scenes went away
and now you have really whatever Fast 9 was.
But to be fair, it was really always about the money.
Some of the lowest grossing movies of like, that franchise
specifically were the favorites
that we found, know, and love.
The Fast and The Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious,
and Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift were some of our favorites
that also just so happened to be the lowest profitable films
of the series versus the $1.5 billion Fast Seven movie,
which might have a little bit to do with Paul Walker,
but even with that, Fast 8, and Fast 9, and Fast 13
are all super high grossing films,
even the spinoff, Hobbs and Shaw,
which I'm not even sure why I watched it.
I did watch it on an airplane 'cause it was free.
So, part one, the introductions of action
in these racing movies were what ultimately
kept them alive as long as they did,
people started to add action scenes
because that's what people like to watch,
the cars were just a byproduct.
People love explosions, they love action,
they love obscurity, they apparently
don't love race wars, okay?
And the recipe of the origins of street racing movies
that we know today needed to change the formula
if a series was to survive, and that's what really happened
with The Fast and the Furious series.
Look past some of the more old school street racing movies,
which aren't really street racing movies, if you generalize,
but car movies like Bullet,
Against All Odds, American Graffiti,
and The Cannonball Run were awesome movies.
If you wanna go back in time to different movies
and you wanna sit down and really just appreciate
what the old school automotive culture was like,
at least from the media's perspective,
go watch those movies.
But they didn't scale with sequels and prequels,
there was just one of them. They were great for solo shots,
but world-building and depth of storylines
aren't really the MO for these type of movies,
and nowadays every movie that comes out on Paramount,
or every movie that goes to theaters
needs to have a three movie split
or some sort of runway to make multiple of them.
And another reason that started to go away
was due to the introduction of so many mediums
that car enthusiasts could get their hands on for things
like street racing and what that street racing meant.
And what I mean by that is you had
the things like YouTube was exploding.
Our boys over at 1320Video were just getting started,
and people were loving the true raw content
that they were making,
and the street racing that was going along with it.
They were able to get everything they wanted
in real life from YouTube.
Netflix had started to really take hold,
which I remember getting DVDs in the mail, okay?
We could get two at a time, we didn't want the three
because that was too much money,
but we got the two at a time, it was awesome.
We thought the streaming was ridiculous, because the movies
that they had to stream were terrible, but it's fine.
The actual entertainment industry grew substantially,
and with that came the media made to support
all hobbies in the world.
You had shows being made left and right, up and down,
and big media channels that were still
just trying to make it big on the big screen
where the money was truly made, the theaters.
And that needed to be the best content
that they could possibly make.
It needed to be A-plus stuff, no risk, high reward,
and everything a normal Joe Blow would want to watch
so that they could make sure that somebody
would buy a ticket for their movie.
What'd they want?
They want explosions, they want Michael Bay sorta.
They don't want no pizza boy statements,
they don't want no Supras, they want explosions, all right?
So what happened with street racing movies?
Well, people kinda ended it.
That's the simplest thing.
Companies saw that there's only a few people
with the want or desire to actually watch movies
solely about street racing, and those that do would prefer
if the acting was at least passable or enjoyable,
because there's other people
that have tried to make street racing movies
that aren't The Fast and the Furious,
and if you watch them, they're really rough.
It's like my first YouTube video.
I mean, there are some kind of funky movies to watch.
And as a result, the money that came from
this sort of series kinda dwindled over time,
and now we're sure movies like Fast 13
will still be racing Fieros in space,
or Need for Speed movies that seem to pop up
every five years or so that are enjoyable
because they have Aaron Paul in it
and he's a pretty decent actor even though
the rest of them are absolutely terrible,
but I don't think we'll see another grass roots
street racing movie for a good long while
that will ever make it to the big screen.
That does leave the essence or question of
maybe it's time to like, do the same thing
the original Fast and the Furious movie was,
but with drifting or something else.
But what do you guys think?
Do you think the original Fast and the Furious
is still a classic, or do you like seeing
Dwayne The Rock Johnson dripping in baby oil
fighting over like, people with Stormtrooper aim?
I still do not understand how - I'm not a good person
to watch a movie with because I genuinely want like, risk.
Like, I want people to get hurt
and/or your favorite character die, okay?
That's why I love Game of Thrones,
it was just a great time, okay?
Sam loves The Notebook, I love real risk.
Let us know below if you're looking for aftermarket
wheels, tires, or suspension, and be sure
to check us out over at fitmentindustries.com.
You're able to get wheels and tires
mounted, balanced, and shipped all free, lower 48 states.
And of course, if you don't wanna save like,
the whole pain of going to an actual tire shop,
we just ship them to you mounted and balanced,
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we'd really recommend checking out our Novia wheels.
I know it's tax season time, time to start
building your car, please don't procrastinate.
I'm Alex from Fitment Industries,
we will see you later, peace.
(upbeat hip hop music)