New Transformers Characters Raise Questions of Racism
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen
Some moviegoers believe two of the new robots in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen are more than meets the eye.
Skids and Mudflap, a pair of robot twins meant to provide comic relief, are being called racial caricatures, according to the Associated Press. The pair, which constantly bicker using street slang, admit they cannot read, and one of them has a gold tooth.
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The new characters have already drawn comparison to Jar Jar Binks, the broken-English-speaking alien from Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace that many fans labeled as a stereotype. But director Michael Bay insists jive-talking twin robots were only meant for laughs.
"It's done in fun," he said. "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."
Mudflap is voiced by black actor Reno Wilson, while Tom Kenny — a white actor who also voices SpongeBob Squarepants — provides the voice of Skids. Wilson said he never thought of the characters — which uploaded what they know about humans from the Internet — as racial stereotypes.
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"It's an alien who uploaded information from the Internet and put together the conglomeration and formed this cadence, way of speaking and body language that was accumulated over X amount of years of information and that's what came out," he said. said. "If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that. It could easily be a Transformer that uploaded Kevin Federline data. They were just, like, posers to me."
Controversy or not, the film opened to the tune of $60.6 million Wednesday, the highest Wednesday opening of all time, according to Variety. Bay said he isn't worried about the bad buzz.
"Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything," he said. "It's like, is everything going to be Melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes."
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