When you have been accused for decades of being a cheap caricature and resorting to ethnic humor for easy laughs, does an endorsement from George Lopez help or hurt your cause?

Speedy Gonzales, the hyperactive Warner Brothers rodent who calls himself “the fastest mouse in all Mexico,” is on the fast track for his own feature film. And not only will Mr. Lopez, the comedian and TBS talk-show host, provide the character’s voice, he also gives Speedy his “Latino seal of approval,” according to his wife and producer, Anne Lopez.

In an interview with the Heat Vision blog of The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Lopez said that this “Speedy Gonzales” film, which will be made by New Line Cinema, will avoid outdated depictions of the cartoon character, who made his debut in the 1953 short “Cat-Tails for Two.”

“We wanted to make sure that it was not the Speedy of the 1950s, the racist Speedy,” Ms Lopez told The Hollywood Reporter. In the new movie, she said, Speedy “comes from a family that works in a very meticulous setting, and he’s a little too fast for what they do.”

The “Speedy Gonzales” film, which does not yet have a release date, will be written Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen, who wrote films for Garfield, the controversially anti-Monday cat.