New Transformers Characters Offend the Super-Easily-Offended

Try to have a little fun with the characters in your new summer blockbuster, as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" director Michael Bay did with his "Skids" and "Mudflaps" ‘bots, and you’re bound to run into all sorts of trouble. The two new characters, twin robots that transform into compact Chevys, bicker with one another in a type street slang that leaves their ‘bot ethnicity in little doubt. And, as it turns out, there are plenty of critics as a result.

In 1999, Wall Street Journal movie critic Joe Morgenstern echoed fan’s annoyance with the "Jar Jar Binks" character in "Star Wars, The Phantom Menace" and described the Binks character as a "Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit" – a reference to a black character from the earlier part of the 20th Century that was built upon racial stereotypes. AP Movie Critic Christy Lemire built on the Morgenstern critique when she referred to Skis and Mudflap as "Jar Jar Binks in car form." Manohla Dargis, who is a movie critic for The New York Times, noted that the characters were given "conspicuously cartoonish, so-called black voices that indicate the minstrelsy remains as much in fashion in Hollywood as when, well, Jar Jar Binks was set loose by George Lucas."

And to think, Bay was just trying to have a bit of fun. Said Bay, "We’re just putting more personality in. I don’t know if it’s stereotypes – they are robots, but the way. These are the voice actors. This is the kind of direction they were taking the characters and we went with it." Bay went on to say that the parts "were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with the characters."