Poor Michael Bay. You use a couple jive-talking, gold-tooth wearing, breakdancing illiterate robots as comic relief and suddenly everyone’s calling you racist. Maybe it’s you who’s racist. Racist against awesome stuff.
Director Michael Bay insists that the bumbling ‘bots are just good clean fun. “We’re just putting more personality in,” Bay said. “I don’t know if it’s stereotypes — they are robots, by the way. [Oh right, I forgot] These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it.”
TV actor Reno Wilson, who is black, voices Mudflap. Tom Kenny, the white actor behind SpongeBob SquarePants, voices Skids. Bay said the twins’ parts “were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with their characters.”
Script excerpt: “Optimus Prime walks up to [HILARIOUS RACIAL STEREOTYPE TK.]. OPTIMUS: ‘Hey you worthless [HILARIOUS ETHNIC SLUR TK.]s, why don’t you get off your asses and get a job instead of blowing all your robot welfare money on [HILARIOUS ETHNIC FOOD TK.]?’ Hold for laughter.”
“I purely did it for kids,” the director said. “Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.”
Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman said they followed Bay’s lead in creating the twins. Still, the characters serve no real purpose in the story, and when the action gets serious, they disappear entirely. [Yahoo]
Orci and Kurtzman added that they weren’t able to squeeze in a few of Bay’s other ideas, like Squint, a “math bot” who’s bad at driving, or Grease Spot, an Autobot who can transform into a Puerto Rican flag and spends all day on his stoop “being loud.” And then there was Tiger, Bay’s beloved but ultimately abandoned idea for a tiger who can transform into “a bigger tiger.”
In the first Transformers, Jazz was a jive-talking, breakdancing robot and the first Autobot to die. Luckily, the sequel promises even more urban flavor.
There are two robots in the film called Mudflap and Skids, and despite being red and green, respectively, they are voiced in a way that clearly designates them to be the “black” robots. Also, Skids has a gold front tooth (no, I’m serious) and both cannot read.
Oh sure, you put a grill on a white transformer and it’s fine, but you put one on a black robot, and then imply that he’s illiterate and make him breakdance and suddenly it’s racist. Maybe you’re the racist, ever thought of that?
Shia LaBeouf’s college dorm room is outfitted with a gigantic poster of Bay’s own Bad Boys 2. Just in case you miss it the first time it comes up, it receives its own loving close-up when Shia begins writing an equation on it later in the film.
See? Bad Boys 2. Michael Bay movie. Starring black people. Clearly he’s proud of it. Boom.
One hot chick is revealed to be a Transformer, and naturally, we discover this when a mechanical tail comes out the back of her thin blue panties. [Movieline]
Look, you sold, me, okay? I’ll see the movie. If my 13-year-old dick had an id, and was racist, it’d be named Michael Bay. In related news, Mudflap and Skids would be good nicknames for your sisters.
