If you’re a “Fast & Furious” fan, a new way to spend money just dropped. Puma has a new line of merch inspired by the movie franchise. There are t-shirts and hats, but the coolest items are the sneakers inspired by cars from the first two movies in the franchise.
The collection includes a bright green shoe based on Brian O’Conner’s Mitsubishi Eclipse from “The Fast and The Furious”, complete with blue and white graphics. Another is bright orange like the Toyota Supra from that movie, and there’s a basic black sneaker that presumably pays homage to Dominic Toretto’s wheelie-pulling Dodge Charger (or maybe the Honda Civic heist cars). The shoes retail for between $110 and $135, so you might have to make a few grocery runs to pay them off.
Representing “2 Fast 2 Furious” are a blue-and-silver shoe based on the livery of O’Conner’s R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R, and a pink one for Suki’s Honda S2000. All that’s missing are red-and-yellow and gold shoes so you and your friends can have a four-wide footrace.
It would be cool to see some merch from “Tokyo Drift,” based on Han’s FD Mazda RX-7 or that rear-wheel drive Mitsubishi Evo, but it’s hard to imagine doing that for the following movies. As the franchise moved away from street racing toward the more traditional action-movie fare of stunts, crashes, and explosions, the cars started to lose their identities. Distinctive liveries were replaced by (admittedly more realistic) monotone paint, and the number of cars per movie increased to the point where few get real hero moments.
The individuality of the cars is part of the charm of the earlier movies, even if some of the aesthetic choices were questionable. If you can rock purple sneakers in tribute to Roman Pearce’s Eclipse from “2 Fast 2 Furious,” more power to ya. More recent movies still have cool cars, but they’re often destroyed or shuffled off screen before they make a real impact.
Whether that will change with the final installment, called “Fast Forever” and scheduled to premiere March, 17, 2028, remains to be seen. Vin Diesel has said the movie will return to Los Angeles and the series’ roots of street racing. The O’Conner character is also slated to return despite the death of actor Paul Walker in a 2013 car crash.