Beetlejuice Was Almost An Autobot

It was opening night of the New Bev since Covid, and my bud Mike Vanderbilt (of the Halloweenies podcast) came up from Chicago with his amazing friends for it. I got to have one of our coveted bar hops where we eventually got to talking about how much we mutually love Lester Green (aka Beetlejuice). Mike dropped the bomb on me that Michael Bay almost got Beet to be in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen! I was too drunk to question it at the time and I wouldn’t look a little more into that until a friend encouraged me just yesterday. 

I will be goddamned if Michael Bay actually had a casting director reach out to Beetle’s manager Bobby about meeting in regards to the possibility. Bobby’s recounting of this story is legendary and I believe it 100%,

“We get there, they put us in a room and Michael Bay pulls up in a golf cart and he has a laptop with him,” recalls Bobby. “He gets out and says ‘Beet, I’m a big fan, great to meet you, I love your voice, I want you to see something.’ He opens up the laptop and he has one of the robot characters with Beetlejuice’s voice. So he says, ‘Come check this out’ and Beet was in one of his moods so it wasn’t looking good.”

“[Bay] says ‘I’m a big fan’ and Beet says ‘Good for you.’ [Bay] says ‘I want you to see this, you have a great voice.’ Beet says ‘Yeah, that’s got nothing to do with me pal.”

The rest of the story goes that Michael Bay wasn’t really having that and the meet was promptly wrapped up afterwards. Between interactions that friends and I had with Michael in both a personable and work environment, I would bet money that even if Bay was a fan of Beetlejuice that it was never going to work out. Just to give you an idea, I personally gave Michael Bay a friendly nod at the Cowboy Stadium premiere of 13 Hours, and was met with an annoyed face on a dismissively shaking head. 

Now imagine someone with that short of a fuse giving a supporting role to a person who had a short cameo in Scary Movie 2 that was reportedly hard to film. Despite that meeting gone sour, Michael went ahead and (more or less) stole Beetlejuice’s likeness and voice for the proposed character anyway. Which was one of the twins (Skids), with the other twin (Mudflap) being voiced by Spongebob voice actor Tom Kenny. Why would you offer a platform for someone’s unique identity when you’re just going to go ahead and forge a scrimblo version of that if they refuse?