In all honesty I’ve been on the fence about the Fast and Furious series until now. Vin Diesel couldn’t do it for me. The Rock couldn’t do it for me. Jason Statham, Tokyo Drift and Charlize Theron’s aggressively unconvincing onscreen kissing technique couldn’t do it for me. By all accounts I was a total lost cause.

But that’s all changed. Because now an animated Fast and Furious show is coming to Netflix, and I genuinely couldn’t be here for it any harder.

Animated movie spin-offs are right in the middle of my wheelhouse. Yours too, probably, if you grew up in the 80s and 90s. Oh boy, what a golden age of indiscriminate animated spin-offs that era was. If you’re worried about the violence and irresponsible driving that a Fast and Furious cartoon might promote, you’d do well to think back a few years and remember just how weird things were back then.

Remember The Real Ghostbusters? That wasn’t based on a kid’s film; that was based on a movie where a dead lady gives Dan Aykroyd a blowjob. Remember the Police Academy cartoon? Once again, those films were rammed to high heaven with blowjobs. There was a Beetlejuice cartoon, even though Beetlejuice was about a demon pimp from hell. They even made a RoboCop cartoon. RoboCop, for the love of God, because kids have traditionally always gone crazy for pitch-black satires dealing with the logical endpoint of military-industrial capitalism.

There was a Rambo cartoon. There was a Karate Kid cartoon. Godzilla, Dumb and Dumber, Bill and Ted and Jumanji had cartoons. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a film that nobody saw or liked during its entire theatrical or home video lifespan, had a cartoon. And it was sort of amazing.

Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with these cartoons. Quite the opposite, in fact. Police Academy: The Animated Series was essentially my third parent for a brief time. And now, in retrospect, I can completely see what they were for. Show a child a toothless, watered-down Saturday morning version of your film and, once they grow old enough to properly appreciate it, they’ll automatically become a fan of the film itself. It’s educational, in a way, so long as you have parents who don’t really pay too much attention to what they’ve plonked you in front of.

Sure, they still make animated spin-off cartoons today. But those are all spin-offs of animated movies that were designed for kids. There are Madagascar spin-offs and How to Train Your Dragon spin-offs and Boss Baby spin-offs. These aren’t true spin-offs, though. They’re shows that look a bit like films your toddler already enjoys, engineered to fool them into thinking they’re the same thing even though the animation is cheaper and the voices are all wrong.

But the Fast and Furious cartoon is an example of the form done exactly right. In no way are those movies suitable for children, but a brightly coloured backdoor entry point will keep them in a happy holding pattern until they’re ready for the hard stuff.

This had better be the start of a whole new wave. Film-makers across the world should be picking up the baton here, creating dumb little cartoon spin-offs of their unsuccessful films in the hope that they can retroactively grow into cult hits. Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur failed at the box office, but an animated spin-off could give it a whole new afterlife. Nobody went to see Only the Brave, but who wouldn’t watch a fun little cartoon about the adventures of some zany firefighters? And don’t forget Mother! It’s even got an exclamation mark in the title, for God’s sake. It already sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon. I mean, yes, you’d probably have to tone down all the skin removal and baby-eating a little. But, just to reiterate, someone made a RoboCop cartoon once, so this still isn’t the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard.