Peter Cullen's Final Optimus Prime Plays This Week, Right After the Film Where Prime Died
This Thursday, September 17, The Transformers: The Movie returns to theaters in 4K, and it stays through Monday, September 21. Hasbro has spent the anniversary on a year-long "Apology Tour," bringing fans together to "grieve, heal, and reminisce." It was a joke about a cartoon robot's death. On Wednesday, August 26, it stopped being only a joke: Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime for more than 40 years, died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.
Select screenings will close with Optimus Prime: Awakening, a new 12-minute animated short carrying Cullen's final performance as the character, with Frank Welker opposite him once more as Megatron. The film kills Optimus Prime in its first act. After the credits, the kids who cried at that scene in 1986 get to hear his voice one more time.
It is the right goodbye, because Prime's death is the whole reason this film still matters. Hasbro killed its hero to make room for new toys, and in the process made the best Transformers film there is.
The cruelty is the point
Nobody who made it saw the reaction coming. Hasbro ordered the film to kill off several existing characters to make way for the new toy line, and the screenwriter, Ron Friedman, warned against losing Prime. "To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove Daddy from the family, that wasn't going to work," he told interviewer Todd Matthy in 2013, as quoted by Den of Geek. Hasbro went ahead. "Kids were crying in the theatres," story consultant Flint Dille recalled. "We heard about people leaving the movie. We were getting a lot of nasty notes about it. There was some kid who locked himself in his bedroom for two weeks."
Cullen himself had no idea how loved Prime was until then. The studio had never passed along the letters children wrote to Optimus, so the backlash was how he found out.
The film flopped, and Leonard Maltin dismissed it as "little more than an obnoxious, feature-length toy commercial." Then the crying kids grew up and kept rewatching it, and the reason is the grief. John Swansburg made the case in Slate in 2007: with Prime gone, the story "becomes one about finding a leader who can take on Prime's mantle."
That is the gap the live-action films never closed. The 1986 film tells you early that nobody is safe, and every scene after it plays with that knowledge in the room. That knowledge is also why this week's screenings will feel like a wake. Nobody in those seats needs to be told what losing Cullen's voice means. The film taught them in 1986.
Where the voices went
Slate called it "one of the stranger casts in cinematic history," and four decades on, the strangeness is the fun.
Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime, Ironhide). Cullen built Prime's voice on his brother Larry, a Marine who served in Vietnam, and on Larry's advice: "Real heroes don't yell and act tough; they're tough enough to be gentle." He carried the role into the live-action era with Transformers and Bumblebee, and last played Prime on the big screen in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). Between Primes he was Eeyore in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, the original voice of KARR on Knight Rider and the creature's vocalizations in Predator, and in 2023 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Children's and Family Emmys. His family asked fans to honor him by leading others "with compassion, integrity, and loyalty and always remember 'be strong enough to be gentle.'"
Frank Welker (Megatron, Soundwave, Wheelie and more). The busiest voice in the cast has played Fred Jones on Scooby-Doo since 1969, Scooby himself since 2002 and Garfield since 2007, with around 850 credits as of 2020. This week he is Megatron and Soundwave again, one final time opposite his friend.
Orson Welles (Unicron). The man whose first film was Citizen Kane recorded his last film role as a planet. He spent October 5, 1985, voicing Unicron and died five days later, at 70. By then his voice was so weak, Slate reported, that technicians ran it through a synthesizer to salvage it, and he read so slowly that the audio was sped up about eight percent. Slate quotes him, via film historian Joseph McBride: "I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other." Listen anyway. It is the most frightening voice in the film, and underneath it you can still hear Kane.
Leonard Nimoy (Galvatron). Spock voiced Galvatron the same year he directed Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and it is a snarling, gleeful turn from the man famous for playing pure logic. He came back to the franchise as Sentinel Prime in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011). Nimoy died in February 2015, at 83.
Judd Nelson (Hot Rod). A year after he played John Bender in The Breakfast Club, Nelson brought the same attitude to Hot Rod. He moved on to New Jack City, but never quite left Hot Rod behind, voicing him again in Transformers Animated and Transformers: Titans Return.
Eric Idle (Wreck-Gar). The Python played the eccentric leader of the Junkions, and it may be the most perfect casting in the film. Monty Python and the Holy Grail came first, in 1975; Idle later turned it into the stage musical Spamalot, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical. He is 83.
Robert Stack (Ultra Magnus). The Emmy winner from The Untouchables had already remade himself as a deadpan comic in Airplane!, and from 1987 to 2002 he hosted Unsolved Mysteries. Stack died in May 2003, at 84.
Lionel Stander (Kup). Kup was voiced by a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild and one of the first Hollywood actors subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blacklisted from the late 1940s until the mid-1960s, Stander rebuilt his career in European genre films and came home to play Max on Hart to Hart. He died in November 1994, at 86.
Scatman Crothers (Jazz). Crothers voiced Jazz on the TV series too, and he was Dick Hallorann in The Shining, the title character of Hong Kong Phooey and Scat Cat in The Aristocats. He died on November 22, 1986, a little over three months after the film opened. He was 76.
Casey Kasem (Cliffjumper). The voice of American Top 40 and the original Shaggy on Scooby-Doo also voiced Cliffjumper and Bluestreak on the series, then quit it in its third season over what he saw as offensive caricatures of Arabs. As he explained in 1990, "in good conscience, I couldn't be a part of that show." Kasem died in June 2014, at 82.
John Moschitta Jr. (Blurr). Blurr got the Micro Machines guy, once listed by Guinness World Records as the World's Fastest Talker at 586 words per minute. He came back as Blurr in Transformers Animated, and he is 72.
How to spend the week
Go, and if your screening carries the short, stay through the credits. Then work outward. Start with The Transformers, the 1984 series, to meet the family Hasbro broke up. Take the three films that explain why this cast was so strange: Citizen Kane, The Breakfast Club and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Finish with Cullen's live-action Prime in Transformers and Bumblebee, which brings back Stan Bush's "The Touch" from the 1986 soundtrack, and then Transformers One, the 2024 animated origin of Optimus and Megatron, voiced by a new cast. It is the best Transformers film since 1986, and even it plays safer than the original did in its first act.
