[Starscream Gaga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MnemonicSyntax

Last I checked, gold toothed, rude, violent, street talking isn't stereotypical to just a certain race or culture.

Besides the gold tooth, I know of a certain Teenaged Turtle trained in Ninjitsu that fits this bill pretty well. He's more of a green color too. Not too much racial/stereotypical profiling there.

I think in order to be racist, you first have to you know, hate a race.

Honestly I don't know what to say to your first point, because they are often associated with negative portrayals of "comical" black people in film and its Michael Bay's job to notice that and see why it could be considered offensive, not just let is slide and lar say "whoops, I didn't know people would be offended! They were funny!". Hell, even their choice of names, out of the hundreds of Transformer names is... Interesting when considering everything else on top of it. Even if his intentions weren't to be offensive, which I don't think they were, the fact remains that many people saw it as very, very off and that's a big deal.

Quote:

As for illiterate? Where was this mentioned? Oh you mean the ancient Cybertronian that no current Transformer could read anyway?

"We don't read much..." (Prior to trying to read it)

Not "This is too ancient for us to read".

Quote:

The "entire world" overacted.

As for Drift, he's very much the stereotype. Being "reasonable", calm, etc. fits the bill more than the opposite of that. There are loads of Eastern culture cliches about the calm, silent, not willing to fight unless needed typeset.

You're welcome to that opinion, but in my eyes they really didn't. I don't think it was an over-reaction at all.

And yes, Drift was absolutely a stereotype, but it wasn't presented negatively. He wasn't squinty-eyes, big eared or spoke broken English, for example.

But this is totally off-topic, so I will leave it be from now on. The fact is that people were offended from Skids and Mudflap and that the fact that they can be connected to so many stereotypes, even if it was possibly unintentional, is a problem and the fact that Reno Wilson didn't mind is totally irrelevant in the long run.