The AP’s Sandy Cohen on Shuck and Jive—I mean Skids and Mudflap—the “Jar Jar Bots” of the latest Transformers installment:
Skids and Mudflap, twin robots disguised as compact hatchbacks, constantly brawl and bicker in rap-inspired street slang. They’re forced to acknowledge that they can’t read. One has a gold tooth.
Actor Reno Wilson, who voices Mudflap and is African-American, explaining his portrayal:
“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. If he had uploaded country music, he would have come out like that.”
And director Michael Bay, who is Peehole-American, being brutally candid as he dismisses the ruckus:
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.”
Now go bust up his chifforobe. From outer space. With an asteroid.
