Everyone’s favorite team of animated snails is back for a whole series of fast-paced, fun adventures. Turbo FAST picks up shortly after the events of the Turbo feature film. Turbo has returned home from his victory tour to discover that his friends have built a brand new Turbo Town to call home, complete with its very own race track. The snails soon decide that they need a name for themselves and come up with Fast Action Stunt Team.
All of your favorite racers are back—super-fast Turbo, his overly-cautious/nervous brother Chet, the fearless White Shadow, jet engined Whiplash, flaming-motored Burn (who has the “hots” for Chet), music-blasting Smoove Move, and the propellered Skidmark. Also back is their human manager Tito. The voice cast is almost completely different from that of the film, with only Ken Jeong (“Kim Ly”) and Mike Bell (“White Shadow”) reprising their roles. However, the new cast does a great job recreating the voices from their movie counterparts—Eric Bauza (“Chet”) does a perfect Paul Giamatti and John Eric Bentley (“Whiplash”) sounds just like Samuel L. Jackson. The creators even have fun with this, like giving Whiplash a line that parodies Jackson’s famous line from Snakes on a Plane. The rest of the new voice cast includes Reid Scott (Veep, My Boys) as Turbo, Grey Griffin (Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja) as Burn, Phil LaMarr (Futurama) as Smoove Move, Amir Talai (Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness) as Skidmark.
This series is so much fun, and had me laughing out loud throughout. Each story finds the snails on some new adventure, dealing with some personal problem or fear, or facing some new enemy of the week. Each time a new character appears on the show, we get a fun pop-up showing statistics about some of that character’s abilities—and there is usual some funny, unique statistic tailored specifically to that character. some of the really talented guest stars doing voices on the series include John DiMaggio, Mark Hamill, Jeff Bennett, Diedrich bader, Maurice LaMarche and Lauren Tom.
There are several layers of humor to each episode—from the witty writing, to fun situations and lots of visual gags. This makes the episodes a joy to watch over and over again.
The visual style of Turbo FAST is drastically different from the film as well as DreamWorks’ previous film spin-off series like Dragons, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness and Monsters vs Aliens. Instead of the rich, detailed, 3D-rendered animation used by those series, Turbo FAST utilizes flash-animation to give the series a 2D look. I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this new style for the characters, but I was wrong. The series pops with brightness and color and the 2D animation adds a really fun feeling to the show. I ended up enjoying this series even more than the original film. It gave me a bit of a nostalgic feeling, like I was watching classic Saturday morning cartoons from my youth.
This DVD collection contains all 26 season 1 episodes, which aired on Netflix between December 2013 and December 14 in batches of 5-6 episodes. All but two of the episodes contain 2 11-minute stories. The pilot and episode 9, “Turbo Drift”, each contain one double-length story.
The picture quality on this DVD set looks excellent, and the audio track makes great use of the surround sound to bring the viewer into the action on screen. The episodes are spread across 3 discs, and each disc has a Play All option as well as episode selection (on a per-episode, not per-story basis). While there are absolutely no bonus features on the discs, the DVD does include an HD Digital Copy of all of the episodes, redeemable via Ultraviolet. This is a great compromise since there is no Blu-ray release offered—fans can still watch the series in HD if they choose. Plus, with the digital copy, you can load the episodes onto your tablet or phone to watch while on the go—an option you don’t get with Netflix.
What’s Included:
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Episodes: (598 min):
- All 26 episodes of the first season:
Disc 1: “Crazy Fast”, “Dungball Derby / Ace of Race”, “Bumperdome / Broaches”, “African Queen / Mega Snails”, “Ants Ants Revolution / Clamsquatch”, “Turbo Stinks / Snails in Jail”, “Tale of Two Turbos, A / The Escargot Affair”, “Surf ‘n Turf / Hardcase Returns”
Disc 2: “Turbo Drift”, “Ready, Set, Glow / Breakneck’s Back”, “Cruise Control / R/C Turbo”, “Curse of the Cicadas / Beat-a Fajita”, “Karmageddon / Chet Gets Burned”, “Gypsy Moth Prophecies / Skidzo-Braina”, “No Can Do / Adopt-a-Toad”, “Buster Move / Gills”, “Terror of Tickula / Prank’d”
Disc 3: “Over Shadowed / Beware the Chickipede”, “Mall Is Well / Taco Tank”, “Zoo Lander / Balloonatics”, “Pocket Racket / Smack Me Down”, “Smoovin’ On Up / The Great Shell Robbery”, “Chet vs. Dr. Disorder / Damselfly in Distress”, “Dome Sweet Dome / My Pet Clamsquatch”, “To Bee or Not to Bee / Hardluck & Hardcase”, “Tur-Bros / The Snailman” - 480p / Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1
- Audio: English Dolby Digital 5.1, Spanish Dolby Surround 2.0, French Dolby Surround 2.0
- Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French
- Closed Captioned
- UltraViolet Digital HD Copy redeemable via Flixster or Vudu
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DVD:
Digital Copy (Redemption Deadline 6/2/2018):
Extras:
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There are no bonus features included.
Final Thoughts:
Turbo FAST is a really fun and entertaining follow-up to the hit animated feature film. It brings back all of your favorite characters in a new and different animation style. Each episode provides hilarious new adventures for the F.A.S.T. team that can be enjoyed over and over again. While the DVD contains no bonus features, it does offer an HD digital copy of all of the episodes, allowing you to take the series on the go. I hope we will see more episodes of this series in the future!
