This rumor comes from a car site, not a movie site, so cover it with grains of salt before you baster it up your pee hole.  But… could the breakdancing, gold-toothed, illiterate, minstrel bots from Transformers 2 be back???  Michael Bay had said a few weeks ago that they wouldn’t, but Michael Bay is also tricky, a self-described MASTER OF DISINFORMATION (*tears Lone Ranger mask off of pet cheetah*).  Muhahaha!

Here’s what sparked the talk, from LeftLaneNews‘ spy account of the Transformers 3 set:

Sporting “Autobot” center caps on the wheels, these two vehicles were captured doing some pre-production work before principal filming starts in a few weeks. We think you are looking at Skidz (green) and Mudflap (orange).
Skidz is looking much sportier than in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, with new front and rear fascias, larger fenders, sportier wheels and a big wing. Mudflap was previously based on the Chevy Traxx concept, but for this installment, it appears both cars will be built off the Chevy Spark.

Hmm, I don’t know, between the spoiler and the ground effects, that car looks more Asian to me.  Not to mention the slanted headlights.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if they brought back the minstrel bots after all.  GM has cars to sell.  Of course they don’t want the bad publicity.  What they should do is bring them back, but make it clear that they’re committed to a much more dignified portrayal of robot cars based on black people.

SKIDS enters drawing room, smoking pipe.

SKIDS
Why Mudflap, whatever is that you’re reading?

MUDFLAP
[seated at desk, looks up from book to regard SKIDS over the top of his reading glasses] Why it’s Jame Joyce, my dear brother.  Ulysses.  Please tell me you’re familiar.

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Michael Bay has confirmed on his official website that the racial caricature bots, Mudflap and Skids, those lovable, breakdancing, gold-toothed illiterates, would not be back for Transformers 3.  In light of there being a Transformers 3, that’s sort of like “a super volcano will destroy the Earth in 30 seconds, but I gave you free extra cheese on your nachos” on the good-news-to-bad-news scale.  If you’ll remember, inseparable screenwriting tickle-fight partners Kurtzman and Orci basically blamed Bay for the bots, and Bay defended them as “good clean fun.”  This week Bay said they were out of “T3″ without comment:

“The Twins are not back in T3.”

I’m a little conflicted on this topic. While there’s nothing more fun than piling on to Michael Bay for comedic purposes, were his minstrel bots actually racist? Most of the people who’ve written about it seem to agree with /Film:

I still find it difficult to believe that the studio and its automotive corporate partner Chevrolet didn’t red-flag these two characters before they got out of the animatic stage. To me, they scream racist caricature, and not in any vaguely defensible way. There’s no commentary being made through them. They weren’t funny, entertaining, or otherwise worth keeping around. I’m no fan of the second film by any stretch, but in a movie that has a great many problems, Skids and Mudflap stand out as outrageously pointless ideas.

Me, I don’t think they were “racist” necessarily.  They were about as idiotic as everything else in Transformers 2, such as Shia LaBeouf dying and going to robot heaven, or the idea that robots can sexually reproduce.  Asking Michael Bay to think about the historical implications of his characters would be like trying to teach a cheetah to throw hand grenades, which Bay has attempted unsuccessfully for more than a decade.  Michael Bay, like Jeff Dunham, is not a racist, he’s just kind of a moron. Look at the twins through Michael Bay’s eyes, ie, completely divorced from context and without any purpose or agenda that you thought about for more than five seconds: what are they?  Breakdancing, gold-toothed, illiterate robots.  If you’ve never read a book, that doesn’t remind you of a minstrel show.  I’ve seen plenty of breakdancing, gold-toothed, illiterate white people too, and they’re usually Michael Bay fans.

(“We sleep in bunk beds.”)

Michael Bay has been taking a lot of heat lately for his jive-talking, illiterate, gold-tooth wearing minstrel bots, and FilmSchoolRejects recently got a chance to ask Transformers screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman about it.

FSR: I heard that the gold tooth was Michael Bay’s idea, but do you have any response to those who found The Twins offensive?
Orci: Number one, we sympathize. Yes, the gold tooth was not in the script, that’s true.
Kurtzman: It’s really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it. I think that would be very foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it’s their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it’s a choice that was made. If anything, it just shows you that we don’t control every aspect of the movie.
FSR: Were you offended by them?
Kurtzman: I wasn’t thrilled. I certainly wasn’t thrilled.
Orci: Yeah, same reaction. I’m not easily offended, but when I saw it, I thought, ‘Someone’s gonna write about that.’”

If you’ve ever seen a press-tour interview, you know it’s almost impossible to get anything out of movie people other than glowing, unoriginal, embarrassing praise.  In the movie business, acknowledging a disagreement and saying “I wasn’t thrilled” is tantamount to calling someone a devil-worshipping holocaust denier.  But that’s why it’s nice to work with Michael Bay.  You know you can say anything you want about him in a print interview, because he’ll probably be too busy shopping for gold teeth to see it, and anyway he can barely read.  True story.