Robert Rodriguez’s ‘Spy Kids’ Added to National Film Registry
Credit: Dimension Films
The Library of Congress has unveiled the 25 movies they’ve added to its National Film Registry for 2024 – and one of them is the 2001 family adventure movie Spy Kids from Mexican American director Robert Rodriguez.
Each year, the National Film Registry honors a new batch of films they deem “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” This is the second movie from Rodriguez’s career that has made the list. In 2011, Rodriguez’s first film, the 1992 independent action flick El Mariachi, was added to the registry.
Spy Kids stars a handful of Latino talent like Alexa Vega, Cheech Marin, Danny Trejo and Guillermo Navarro. The film follows a pair of siblings who find out their mom and dad are retired spies. When their parents get kidnapped, the kids must set out to save them from an evil villain and his henchmen. In the last 24 years, Spy Kids has expanded into a franchise with four sequels and an animated series, which lasted two seasons.
Carla Gugino, who played the mom in the movie, recently spoke to the Library of Congress about the addition of Spy Kids into the registry.
“[Spy Kids] was the first family movie [where] the kids were the heroes and the parents were also cool,” Gugino said. “A lot of that was just truly the environment and the dream that Robert [Rodriguez] and [producer] Elizabeth [Avellán] created.”
Along with Spy Kids, four other films with Latine themes and actors were added to the registry. They were American Me, Mi Familia and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which stars late Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban in the title role.