People need to chill out

In anticipation of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I've been keeping up with all the news and whatnot leading up to the release last night.

Besides critics that don't seem to get the idea that this movie is not meant to be mentioned in the same breath as Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, and other cinematic masterpieces, something that keeps coming up is the apparent racist depiction that a couple of the characters have.

Now, I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm going to see it Saturday, so I reserve judgement until then, but I do believe people are overreacting. Just because they talk in jive and exhibit "African American characteristics" is no reason to get bent out of shape. Now, the whole not being able to read thing...I can see that.

These characters are being compared to the offensive black face characters and Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. From what I can tell, they are there for comic relief mainly.

Why is it that whenever any character exhibits the slightest bit of racial characteristics, people all of a sudden play the race card and say the director or whoever is racist?



Now, if these were actual human beings, they may have a point, but fact is, they are giant alien robots! Is society so hell bent on crying foul, that they'll go so far as to attack CGI creations? They did the same thing with the previous Transformers as well, but the characterization of the "African-American character" wasn't as bad, and in all honesty fit his personality from the original cartoon (I should know, Jazz was/is my favorite. Shame he had to die...but that's a whole different blog).

Think of all the people you've been friends with over your life. Don't they all have different personalities, regardless of race? That's what I think the idea for these two is. I mean, they can't very well have the same persona as the other Transformers. Each one is different, so let them be different.

To me, calling this racist is like crying wolf. They do this so much nowadays that its hard to tell what is or isn't racist. For goodness sakes, look at the list of things that have been considered racist...Native American mascots, Speedy Gonzales (yet, not Pepe Le Pew), the upcoming Disney movie The Princess and the Frog, and the list goes on and on and on....

Am I the only one that thinks society needs to take a look at itself and stop accusing everything of being racist? In jr. high, I had a teacher that wanted us to use exclusively black ink. I called her an inkist...lol

At the rate we are going today, though, someone with the same idea as me, only more serious would accuse her of alienating blue and red ink and call her racist. What about black desks as opposed to other colors? White-out? Red grapes as opposed to purple? Get the picture?

I'm not going to sit here and say that there aren't offensive and/or racist things out there, because there are, but it is apparent to me that society can't tell the difference between a joke and seriousness.

After I see the movie, I'll be posting my own opinion on their characterization, but in the meantime, I maintain my stance that folks are overreacting!