Kevin Dunn played similar roles in both Transformers and Small Soldiers, portraying frustrated fathers trying to connect with their teenage sons.
One supporting star from the Transformers franchise played a bizarrely similar role in an unrelated movie years earlier.
Screen veteran Kevin Dunn has appeared in a wide range of major movies and TV shows, from comedies like Hot Shots and Ghostbusters II to political dramas like Nixon and All the King's Men. However, one of his most notable roles is as Ron Witwicky in Michael Bay's Transformers movie franchise. While Ron may not be the main character in the sequels Revenge of the Fallen and Dark Side of the Moon, he is the father of Shia LaBeouf's original series protagonist. Interestingly, this coincidentally played two incredibly similar roles in ten years due to an earlier sci-fi action comedy.
In the Transformers franchise, Dunn portrays the irritable father of LaBeouf's suburban teen Sam, a shy teenage protagonist who discovers that his car is sentient and is currently caught up in a war against evil versions of its own kind.However, Dunn’s roles in both Transformers and Small Soldiers are similar in that they both show a father struggling to connect with his teenage son. Both characters in both movies struggle to support their sons’ hobbies and find themselves frustrated by their sons’ apparent immaturity. Both fathers initially refuse to believe the predicament their child is in, only to later admit that their son has done a good job of corralling the chaos given the wild nature of their circumstances. It is essentially the same role, although Small Soldiers portrays the bitter Abernathy a little less sympathetically than Transformers depicts Sam’s well-meaning father.
Although the Transformers franchise predates Small Soldiers, Joe Dante's underrated '90s hit still had a significant influence on Bay's 2007 blockbuster. Bay's 2007 movie is a larger-scale reinterpretation of Small Soldiers, with similar elements of military satire, a bumbling teenage antihero, and a romance subplot with a girl next door. While the robots of the Transformers movies possess sentience due to their alien origin, the heroes and villains of Small Soldiers were brought to life using experimental microchips. However, Transformers still draws inspiration from Small Soldiers, evident in Kevin Dunn's roles in both movies.
Transformers is a multimedia franchise consisting of movies, TV shows, video games, and comics. The franchise revolves around a race of humanoid robots called the Autobots who must protect Earth from the Decepticons. Some of the most renowned characters include Megatron, Optimus Prime, and Bumblebee. In 2007, the first live-action movie in the franchise was released starring Shia LaBeouf.