On August 26th, 2026, my social media was filled with devastated men announcing the death of Peter Cullen. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I looked him up. Upon seeing the results, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was going to have to text my husband at work and let him know that Optimus Prime had died, not to be resurrected this time.
Of course, I meant Peter Cullen, the voice actor behind the iconic voice of Optimus Prime.
I, too, watched Transformers as a child in the ‘80s and, of course, loved Optimus Prime. Who didn’t? But I didn’t connect with him quite the way that my husband and all the other boys of the Gen 1 era did.
Back then, Peter Cullen had a pretty good little acting career going. He was on comedy shows, variety shows, worked as an announcer and started doing voice acting. In 1984, he was living with his slightly older brother Larry when he had an audition for a new cartoon series. Larry asked him what it was for. Cullen said it was for a talking truck. Larry laughed.
Cullen said, “He’s a hero truck, a real leader.”
His brother got serious. He was a decorated Marine Corps captain that had served in Vietnam. Larry said, “If you’re gonna be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be a Hollywood hero type with all the B.S. and trying to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.”
Cullen said he took that advice to heart, went to his audition and nailed the heroic character. He just played his brother.
He got the part and, taking his brother’s advice to make Optimus “strong enough to be gentle” he struck a chord in the hearts of boys across the nation who formed a bond to the fatherly leader. But Cullen didn’t know it because Hasbro never passed on all the fan mail he was getting. He, in fact, did not know how beloved he was until he was killed off in the much-anticipated Transformers movie in between the second and third seasons of the television show. Boys left the theatres inconsolable and in tears because the Autobot leader – their hero – was killed off. My husband still has PTSD from that movie watching experience.
The little fans did not know that Hasbro had planned to launch a new toy line and so, had to make room for new characters by killing off a bunch of the established characters. (Or, as the marketing department at Hasbro called it, “phasing out the older toy line.”). What the boys saw as heroes and friends, Hasbro saw as outdated merchandise.
The fans reacted with anger and devastation. They stopped buying toys, they stopped watching the show and they started a letter writing campaign. The ratings for Season 3 dropped so much that Hasbro finally ordered the writers to resurrect Optimus Prime. He was brought back at the end of Season 3 to fight a “raging and universe-wide ‘Hate Plague.’” To which my husband commented, “That ‘Hate Plague’ was directed against Hasbro and they brought (Optimus) back to stop it.” Hasbro was being meta before it was cool to be meta.
In 2007, when Michael Bay announced his intention to make a live action Transformers movie that would include Optimus Prime, Cullen’s fans, once again, came out for him and demanded he get the part. The fan lobby was so large and intense, it eventually convinced the reluctant production team to give the part to Cullen.
Peter Cullen was the definitive voice of Optimus Prime and his fans would have no one else.
I read through the tributes from his fans:
- “When I was home alone, you were with me as a kid.”
- “You were a huge part of my childhood.”
- “Your words, your lessons, your bravery, and your kindness truly lit our darkest hours.”
- “Transformers and Optimus Prime saved my life.”
- “I will be ‘strong enough to be gentle’ in honor of your iconic life and legacy.”
- “G1 Optimus was always sort of a father figure to me.”
- “Us autobots down here will continue to fight off the decepticons for you. AUTOBOTS ROLL OUT!”
- “I am lost.”
- “Thank you for being my hero. You’ll never know how much you impacted my life. You gave me someone to look up to. You gave me hope when there was none. You gave me courage when I was scared. You helped shape who I am today.”
- “Thank You for being the inspiration the little girl in me needed in times of darkness.”
- “Thank you, Peter, for making my childhood a little brighter during the dark times and giving me hope.”
- “There are voices we simply hear. And then there are voices that become a part of us.”
- “He was my childhood hero.”
- “Peter was someone that helped me grow into a man! His lessons taught through Prime were irreplaceable and formed much of who I am!”
- “Farewell to the only true father figure I ever had.”
What happened here? How did a character from a cartoon that was essentially created to serve as a commercial to sell toys find his way into the hearts of so many boys? To the point where he couldn’t be killed off. To the point where his voice actor was irreplaceable. To the point where grown men across the nation today are tearing up while eulogizing a man that most of them never met and that, for many years, they didn’t even know what he looked like. And why did it only happen with him and not He-Man or Duke or Lion-O?
Having lived through that time, I think several things came together to create a vacuum in the hearts of little boys.
Materialism really came on strong in the 1980s. Church attendance started a downward trajectory and was replaced by hanging out at shopping malls. Classic literature that generally pushed denying oneself of material pleasure in order to live virtuously was replaced by movies and music that pushed indulging in material pleasures and embracing vice. A lot.
Dual income households were becoming the majority and this was the peak era of the latchkey kid. Latchkey kids were home by themselves from after school until dinner, when their parents came home from work.
The 8os were just coming off peak divorce rates in this country, so there was a lot of familial turmoil and a loss of stability for a lot of kiddos.
There were no contemporary warrior heroes for little boys. There were professional athletes, but they weren’t warriors. There were action heroes who played warriors, but their movies were always rated R so little boys couldn’t see them.
The Vietnam war veterans kept their heroics to themselves because:
- Many of them saw horrible things and didn’t want to talk about it.
- They were treated so badly when they first came back from war by the American public they were kind of trained not to talk about their service even if they wanted to.
Ipso Facto, they were a quiet bunch who never got their moment to be lauded for their heroics and revered by the younger generation.
There wasn’t an active war going on, just the Cold War. And everyone involved in the Cold War couldn’t tell anyone about it because it was all classified.
And finally, cartoons hadn’t yet started down the trajectory of being “educational.” Cartoons in the 80s still had a very strong theme of good versus evil and with good triumphing. So, while the rest of the world was pushing crass consumerism, cartoons were maintaining a disappearing world of archetypal storylines. And it probably didn’t hurt that most of the “Transformers” episodes were written by men.
All these things seemed to come together in a very particular way in the hearts of little boys.
We all have hearts that seek the higher things, but children have hearts seeking them all the more in that they are still so innocent and untouched by the world. Boys, in particular, want to fight bad guys, to be courageous and to vanquish evil. They want a strong, virtuous male role model that would lead them into battle, share his wisdom and hang out with them in the afternoons.
In that age of transition when everything was losing its soul, when all was starting to become disposable, when it looked like humanity, itself, would be lost, a sentient robot alien appeared in the afterschool cartoon line up to rescue kids from it all and lead them in battle for 22-24 minutes a day.
Poor Hasbro didn’t know what hit them. They thought they were creating toy lines when, to little boys, they were creating friends. And Cullen’s Optimus Prime rose head and shoulders above the rest as a mentor, father figure, leader and hero. Peter Cullen, on the advice of his brother, used his talent to give voice to Optimus not as a cartoonish, bombastic, “trying to be tough” kind of hero, but as an actual hero. A real leader who was “strong enough to be gentle.” Kids know authenticity when they see it and they saw that Optimus Prime, as voiced by Peter Cullen, was the real deal. He filled the vacuum that had been created in their little hearts by all the turmoil of the age and they bonded to him like a Headmaster to an Autobot.
Peter Cullen loved his little fans right back and never missed a chance to express his gratitude to and for them.
“I love you guys!” he told them in one interview, his face like that of a kindly father. And then with a bigger smile and in his Optimus voice: “Roll out!”
An actor recently said that the 80’s were “a brutal time for people” and that they shouldn’t be looked at with nostalgia because they were “really scary.” He was wrong about what was making the 80’s “a f–cking mess” and he was wrong when he said “people forget” the tensions of that time. (I’m going to assume that he was not a Transformers fan and if he was, he clearly didn’t learn anything.)
We just witnessed that an entire generation of men did not forget the unsettling aspects of the 1980s. But here’s the thing, they also didn’t forget who helped them get through it all. GK Chesterton once wrote that children have intimate knowledge of dragons. “Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly.” Chesterton writes that children already know about such things because such things are already in the world. “What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
As every time does, the 80s came with its own evil or ugly. But the children of the 80s were lucky enough to have a fairytale called “the Transformers” to provide them with their St. George. And now they mourn the man who taught them that yes, there are dragons, but they can be defeated.
Rest in peace, Peter Cullen. “Till all are one!”
0 Comments