Those Idiotic, Jive-Talkin' Robots Won't Be Back in 'Transformers 3' After All
So much about "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen" was horrible that picking a least favorite moment is like choosing between your children, if you kinda hated your children. But you really can't fall much farther than "Mudflap" and "Skids," the "urban" robots that, as The New York Times' Manohla Dargis' rightly said, "have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas." Director Michael Bay defended Mudflap and Skids (who, in the year 2009, had gold teeth and bug ears), claiming, "We're just putting more personality in. I don't know if it's stereotypes -- they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it."
But even Bay is smart enough to avoid more controversy while he can, claiming Monday on the official Michael Bay fan board -- oh, by the way America, there are Michael Bay fan boards -- that the twins will not appear in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."
A fan blog tried to get fired up that Bay was lying, with reports that new and "improved" versions of Mudflap and Skids were seen on the set yesterday, but they have the date wrong on the post; the post they're referencing is more than a year old. So it looks like there will not in fact be awful stereotypes of African-Americans as portrayed by robots from an alien planet in the third "Transformers" movie. In Michael Bay's brain, perhaps this is considered progress.
So much about "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen" was horrible that picking a least favorite moment is like choosing between your children, if you kinda hated your children. But you really can't fall much farther than "Mudflap" and "Skids," the "urban" robots that, as The New York Times' Manohla Dargis' rightly said, "have been given conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate that minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas." Director Michael Bay defended Mudflap and Skids (who, in the year 2009, had gold teeth and bug ears), claiming, "We're just putting more personality in. I don't know if it's stereotypes -- they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it."
But even Bay is smart enough to avoid more controversy while he can, claiming Monday on the official Michael Bay fan board -- oh, by the way America, there are Michael Bay fan boards -- that the twins will not appear in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."
A fan blog tried to get fired up that Bay was lying, with reports that new and "improved" versions of Mudflap and Skids were seen on the set yesterday, but they have the date wrong on the post; the post they're referencing is more than a year old. So it looks like there will not in fact be awful stereotypes of African-Americans as portrayed by robots from an alien planet in the third "Transformers" movie. In Michael Bay's brain, perhaps this is considered progress.