How could I, of all people, not have thoughts about the passing of Peter Cullen? He voiced the first male role model I could trust, after my own Dad. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had reasons for not trusting male humans, and a lot of anger towards females, too. In time I healed, and was able to find forgiveness, for myself and those who had hurt me. Granted the journey is not over, but it was Peter’s voicing of Optimus Prime that helped center me in who I am, in addition to my faith in Jesus Christ as a Latter-day Saint of his Church.
My relationship with Transformers is complicated, in a word. I wouldn’t even consider myself a serious Generation One fan. I’ve read some of the comics, seen some of the cartoon and picked up on the adventures of series much later on. Is any one of us truly a fan of all that Saturday Morning Marketing as a whole? I daresay not; it is the characters that caught our attention, and our imaginations.
If not for this, why would we have grown up to invest our energy and ideas in bring emotional gravitas to their stories. The robots are cool, the vehicles they turn into, yeah, pretty neat. As a kid, what caught my attention was Transformers: The Movie, in 1986. My role model died, and admittedly I wasn’t broken up about that. My best friend and I somehow had made an audio recording and we memorized all the lines and performances.
Since Peter’s passing, I’ve heard so many of my fellow brothers and sisters in the fandom speak about how much Optimus fought for and would protect those weaker than him on the basis of principles. In life Peter was an honourable as the character he portrayed. Mind you, he wasn’t afraid to play villains, and those in-between. Let’s not conflate the man with his commitment to his roles. Not that I’ve heard anyone doing so.
Though that is a form of honour unto itself. Peter loved his fans, and I suspect it wasn’t for quite some time that he came to understand just what the first death of Optimus Prime meant to so many children, now parents. For a long time I didn’t understand that Transformers was a vehicle of its own, and I had to come to grips with an inconsistent universe and equally diverse characters who sometimes shared the same names.
All except Optimus Prime. Bumblebee has gone through some changes, matured, and found himself a dedicated audience, though that is contested as well. The leader of the Autobots, however, is as well defined and central as Megatron for the Decepticons, voiced by the venerable Frank Welker, a life-long friend of Peter Cullen. I doubt that Transformers would have continued to be successful for Hasbro had they not grounded the series with their formidable performances.
Not to step on the efforts of everyone else who has stepped up to the microphone, but no two other characters had the leading ‘bot definition and identity of our protagonist, and antagonist, respectively. Others have tried, but none have had the lasting impact, drawing fan attention and support as new productions have hit our screens. Hasbro learned the hard way that it’s not so easy to give a toy a personality and then expect us to dispose of them when they want us to buy the next version.
There’s something endearing about that component of human nature. As for me, I did find human male role models and that’s a roster I won’t get into here. Perhaps later. Star Trek: The Next Generation held some of those, Babylon 5, oh, and a bunch of others. Reading Anne McCaffery gave me strong female role models to admire and respect. But then, almost inevitably, Transformers was back again.
At that time I had on idea who this Bay fellow was. I didn’t even know Peter Cullen’s name and certainly not his long list of credited (and uncredited) roles. The Predator AND Eeyore? Dude. Talk about chops.
I won’t nitpick The Transformers Bayverse. The franchise has always had its silly moments, and most of its stories weren’t the sort of thing you’d remember next week. Then the Aligned Continuity gave us Transformers: Prime, and boy howdy is that some choice storytelling. Watch it. From the production team that has given us Jackie Chan Adventures—and more besides—we get a tale of real emotional challenges, struggles and loss. RC suffers PTSD and so much more.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one to appreciate that as us core and cohort fans grow older that our expectations of realism shift as we begrudgingly accept the grim reality of our own aging process. The Energon universe speaks to the precious nature of our temporary lives with a grittier than ever interpretation of what was once childhood fare. We certainly do ourselves and our children a disservice by underestimating their capacity to understand life.
But back to Peter Cullen, who picked up the role for which he is most beloved: A level headed, self-controlled soldier who does what is right because there is no other path. While we expand on the depths of Megatron’s depravity, Optimus is ennobled even moreso, even as Peter takes on morally grey characters such as Invincible’s Titus. If anything this underscores the honour with which we must live, and I’m grateful that he braved such a role.
So here we are now, with Peter Cullen having departed to the other side of mortality. I love that the phrase we’ve used to show our love and respect for his life is “Till All Are One.” It fits my understanding of what comes after, and what I know to be true in my heart. We will be together again, and there’s so much to do, after we’ve moved beyond mortality. Whether you believe this or something else, the call has gone out, inspired by Larry Cullen: “Be strong enough to be gentle.”
So let’s do that, and see where it takes us.
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