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Why Peter Cullen’s Death Hits Gen X So Hard
The resonant voice behind Optimus Prime introduced a generation to mortality. Now that lesson feels personal again
Optimus Prime returned from the dead and kept fighting for another four decades, always with Peter Cullen’s voice.
Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
You may not recognize Peter Cullen’s face, but if you grew up in the 1980s, you knew his voice.
The Canadian voice actor was Optimus Prime in The Transformers, Eeyore in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and the source of the Predator’s otherworldly clicks and growls. But it was Optimus who broke the heart of an entire generation.
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Cullen, who died this week at 85, made the enormous red-and-blue robot sound more convincing as an authority figure than most adults on TV. He returned to Optimus Prime for nearly four decades, voicing him in cartoons, video games and live-action movies.
In 1986, when I went to see the new animated feature The Transformers, I’d already spent two seasons watching Optimus defend the Autobots against Megatron, leader of the villainous Decepticons. I knew the deal: Megatron would make threats, lasers would fly and Optimus would put him back in his place. He’d give a little inspiring speech, the bad guys would learn something, yada yada yada, roll credits.
The movie seemed to be headed toward the same ending. But then Megatron got lucky. Optimus took a hit and went down hard. As the Autobots gathered around him, Optimus closed his eyes. The blue light disappeared, and his red-and-blue body turned gray. I waited for somebody to fix him. They were robots, after all. But his eyes never lit up again. Optimus Prime was dead.
Peter Cullen found the vulnerability in every character he voiced, whether it was Eeyore’s loneliness or the gentleness beneath Optimus Prime’s commanding baritone.
Jamie McCarthy/WireImage/Getty Images
The series continued, with new characters and battles and a planet voiced by Orson Welles. But I barely processed any of it. I was still stuck beside that gray body, trying to grasp how a character I’d spent 65 episodes trusting could just … stop existing.
Gen X kids had already endured more than a few movies that seemed weirdly determined to injure us emotionally, like Artax sinking into the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story and E.T. turning chalky and motionless while Elliott screamed for him to wake up. But Optimus Prime felt different.
Even after leaving the theater, I couldn’t shake that dread. If Optimus Prime could die, that meant all protectors could die. More terrifyingly, if you connected the dots, it meant anyone who seemed powerful could die — even the adults who took care of us, loved us and kept us safe.
I was 16 years old, but in that theater I became 10 again, having an existential crisis over a dead truck and the horrifying new possibility that my parents might not be invincible either.
Years later, I learned that Optimus Prime hadn’t died because some writers believed children needed a bracing lesson about grief and sacrifice. He died because Hasbro wanted to sell us different toys. The original Transformers had been on store shelves for two years, and the movie offered an efficient way to clear out the old product line and introduce a new one.
Apparently, my first confrontation with mortality was a fourth-quarter merchandising decision.
The kids were not OK with this. They cried in theaters, stormed out before the end and sent angry letters to Hasbro. The company figured we’d get over Optimus and ask our parents to buy Hot Rods instead. We were not getting over Optimus.
Cullen was the reason Optimus felt alive. The voice was inspired by Cullen’s older brother Larry, a Marine who’d served in Vietnam. Before Cullen auditioned, he told Larry he was trying out for the role of a “hero truck.”
“If you’re going to be a hero, be a real hero,” Larry told him. “Don’t be a Hollywood stereotypical thing with the yelling and screaming. Be strong enough to be gentle.”
Cullen took that advice into the recording booth. Optimus sounded powerful but was never intoxicated by his own power. He was the giant robot equivalent of the adult who kneels to talk to a frightened child. For Hasbro, Optimus was a product that had run its course and was ready for retirement. Little did they realize that Cullen had a deeper bond with his audience than just toy sales.
The protests worked: Hasbro eventually brought Optimus Prime back to life, and Cullen returned to the role again and again, including the live-action movie series. And Gen X got to pretend that our first great hero had never really died. Death, at least in the toy aisle, could be corrected when it tested badly with consumers.
We don’t get that comforting loophole with Peter Cullen.
I’m not sure that watching Optimus die prepared any of us for losing parents, friends or the people whose voices had been in our lives since childhood. Nothing does. But it introduced the possibility. Forty years ago, Cullen made us believe that a hero could die. He also made us believe that strength did not have to be cruel, loud or frightening.
The man is gone now. The voice remains, deep and steady, reminding us to be strong enough to be gentle.
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