August 26, 2026.
It was a Wednesday morning. I can’t remember if I had school that day because the only thing I could think of at that point was waking up, grabbing my phone to check my messages, and seeing a few notifications from a group chat that I talked to pretty frequently. One of the people in it sent a link followed by the message “someone should check on [Bill].”
It was the kind of thing I had dreaded seeing strewn across my phone screen like tape covering a mouth: “Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise, has passed away at 85.”
I threw my phone with inconsolable sadness and let out a “fuck!” in rage as I rolled out of my bed. My brother came to my room figuring that I had hurt myself. I hadn’t; it was the passage of time taking my childhood heroes that had hurt me. I told him the news and he relayed that information to my parents who, knowing my love of Optimus Prime as both a character and what he represented, immediately felt saddened by my plight.
After honing his acting and voice acting chops in the 1970s, even voicing King Kong at one point, Cullen began to audition for various animated projects during the 1980s. It was one such audition that caught the attention of his brother Larry, a Vietnam veteran and a retired captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Although Optimus was initially described to him as just a truck, it was when Peter brought up the fact that he was a “hero” that made Larry go stone-faced and serious.
“Don’t be a Hollywood hero type with all the BS and the yelling and screaming and trying too hard to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.”
Larry Cullen’s advice to his brother, Peter
“Peter, if you want to be a hero, be a real hero,” he said. “Don’t be a Hollywood hero type with all the BS and the yelling and screaming and trying too hard to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.”
That last sentence is the exact ethos of Optimus Prime. He’s tough but only when he needs to be, like a father figure, which is what he was to millions, if not hundreds of millions of fans across the globe for multiple generations. Cullen’s voice is what people think of when they try to do an impression of the character. The warm, bassy tones that rattled through television speakers since 1984 still bring comfort to many a fan even after all this time.
Although the rest of the week was just as terrible as that day, starting with death acquiring the souls of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry on the same day, it was Cullen’s passing that left a hole in my chest. My spark had grown dimmer with that revelation.
Growing up, there were two things I was obsessed with: Thomas the Tank Engine and Transformers, the latter more so than the former because it was more exciting to see giant robots that turned into cars and fought each other than trains worrying about getting scrapped because they weren’t being really useful.
There were three pieces of Transformers content that I remember visiting the most as an early fan:
There was the original television series that ran from 1984-87, commonly nicknamed Generation 1 by fans. Here, Prime had a noticeable sense of humility to him. He was less like a grizzled war veteran and more like my father. Kind and empathetic but when the going got tough, extremely willing to get his hands dirty in order to protect the common good.
His death during the show’s film adaptation The Transformers: The Movie in 1986 led to a notorious uproar in American households. Thousands of letters from angry parents poured into Hasbro’s offices. It got so bad that they brought him back in the episodes “Dark Awakening” and two-parter “The Return of Optimus Prime,” which speaks to the magnitude of his character.
Of course, I knew it was coming, seeing as I was on the internet a lot in my youth and, while it was a spoiler, I didn’t mind since he was alive in other pieces of media. But even then, the way it was delivered in that film still kind of irked me since it was taken so seriously in a continuity that was generally lighthearted and silly.
Then there were the live-action films directed by Michael Bay, but I want to bring up the first three films from 2007-2011 because they act as a sort of trilogy. Now, I could go on about how the films paint him in a more violent and gruesome light, but it makes more sense when you remember the more realistic and grittier vibe they were going for. The War on Cybertron had been going on for millions of years, so it would only make sense for Prime in this grounded version of the story to want it to end sooner, even if it meant ripping off a few faces.
And finally, there was Transformers: Prime, one of the flagship shows for Hasbro’s cable channel The Hub. I bring this one up specifically because it’s basically a mix of both the original 1984 television series and live action film series. Optimus, although still the grizzled war veteran, carries the emotional and hopeful nature of his G1 counterpart, only resorting to violence as a means to protect or defend things and people.
The common thread through these pieces of media was the voice of Optimus Prime being Peter Cullen. He had this warmth to him; his voice was soft yet grating like low-grit sandpaper. The growl that came from him when it got deeper was like clarified butter. I could listen to him talk for hours. And one of the best parts of his character was, despite his imposing stature, he was the bot with the most humility in him, a perfect fit for the Matrix of Leadership, and a perfect fit to lead the heroic Autobots.
When Optimus dies in The Transformers: The Movie, his optics flash a sky-blue color before his body turns a gray color. I bring this up because Fathom did a 40th anniversary re-screening from Sept. 17-21 coupled with a new short film featuring Cullen in his final voice role as Optimus Prime. I’m sure people who bought tickets cried during the screenings.
I’m not the only one whose life turned a little grayer with the loss of a key piece of their childhood.
Godspeed, Mr. Cullen, till all are one.
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