Transformers One’s Bumblebee Will Change How You Watch the Other Films
Exclusive: Keegan-Michael Key discusses showing a different side to everyone’s favorite banana-colored Autobot in Transformers One.
| | A case can be made that in the 21st century Bumblebee has become the most popular Transformer. He’s certainly the most loved Autobot after the big semi truck we call Optimus Prime. This is in large part due to his starring role in the first live-action Transformers movie of 2007. Despite having almost no lines of dialogue—the poor robot lost his voice!—Bumblebee found novel ways of communicating with Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky: he used music and created the sensation of your first car as a teenager being your best mate.
It’s a trick that was expanded on in the prequel spinoff Bumblebee (2018), and it might be getting a whole new dimensionality now thanks to the upcoming animated film, Transformers One. Due out in September, the movie takes place three billion years ago—so long that whichever Transformers canon it may be a part of is practically mooted. Be that as it may, the setting offers a ground floor origin story for all our favorite Transformers, as well as a new way to view them, especially Bumblebee.
As confirmed to us by the yellow Autobot’s new voice actor, comedy star Keegan-Michael Key, Bumblebee is going to be an absolute motormouth.
“He’s very loquacious, this character,” Key tells Den of Geek at San Diego Comic-Con. “His name is B-127, and he never stops talking. He’s a chatterbox, and it’s because, mostly, he has no one to talk to because of his station in life on Cybertron. So then when other sentient beings come into his life, he is thrilled beyond measure and starts talking to them all the time.”
The character obviously appeals to Key, who makes no attempt to hide a lifelong affection for the Transformers characters. During our brief conversation, the star and co-creator of Key and Peele reveals he still can imitate the sounds of the Transformers from the original 1980s cartoon he watched while growing up. He also reveals he suspects his version of the Autobot who will one day be rechristened Bumblebee will also change how you perceive Bumblebee in the other films, particularly the first Transformers and Bumblebee where the autobot is effectively silenced.
“I think it’s going to be a neat juxtaposition if [people] start rewatching the live-action movies,” Key explains. “There’s going to be this kind of sympathy or pathos for Bumblebee, because you’ll go, ‘Oh my God, he loved to talk! And now he can’t talk, he can’t express himself the way he used to express himself.’”
It certainly would add more texture to how frustrated the car got when LaBeouf’s Sam was unable to tell Megan Fox’s Mikaela Banes how he felt about her in the 2007 movie—or when Bumblebee low-key jostled Sam for cheating on her in the sequel.
In the meantime, fans can expect to hear a lot more from B-127 and the other Transformers in their pre-live-action days, including with Chris Hemsworth as Orion Pax (the ‘former who would be Optimus), and Brian Tyree Henry as D-16 (the future Megatron), when Transformers One opens in theaters on Sept. 20.