I was a huge Transformers nerd as a kid. Not casually into it - genuinely, structurally obsessed, the kind of kid who once spotted a flat-nosed semi on the highway, decided with total conviction that it was Optimus Prime, and demanded my mother acknowledge the Autobot logo I was absolutely certain was painted on the door. She laughed. I did not. I’m still not convinced I was wrong, and for the record: if I drove a flat-nosed rig today, in 2026, I would paint an Autobot logo on it without a second thought. Some things you don’t grow out of, you just stop mentioning them out loud.
The First Time #
When Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986, my dad took me to see it, reasoning that a kid who loved the cartoon would obviously love the movie. Quick math puts me at six years old. Neither of us could have predicted what happened next.
The Decepticons attack Autobot City on Earth, and the Autobots show up to save the day, Prime leading the charge - and for a few glorious minutes it’s the coolest thing I had ever seen in my six-year-old life. Prime is flying through the air, pulling a massive gun out of thin air, absolutely mowing down Decepticons while The Touch by Stan Bush plays over the whole thing like the movie somehow knew exactly what a kid needed to hear. I was on the edge of my seat thinking this is it, this is peak Prime, this is the best movie ever made.
And then Megatron wastes him. No build-up I was equipped to process, no warning - one second he’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on a screen, the next he’s gone. Ultimate high straight into ultimate low, in about the time it takes to say it. I lost it completely. I ran out of the theatre crying, the full meltdown, and my dad had to chase me down into the lobby. I genuinely don’t know how he talked me back into that seat. Whatever he said, it worked, because I was back in my seat in time for the part where Hot Rod - who I will always maintain had at least something to do with getting Prime killed in the first place - opens the Matrix of Leadership, and Peter Cullen’s voice comes nowhere and says “Arise, Rodimus Prime”. I was right back on the edge of my seat. Say what you want about the audacity of killing off the main character twenty minutes in - they did a genuinely great job with the new batch of Transformers that came out of it.
Somewhere over the following decades that whole sequence turned from trauma into one of my favourite childhood memories. Which tells you something about how a wound heals, if you leave it alone long enough.
Why Optimus #
Optimus Prime was the kind of leader I didn’t have the vocabulary for as a kid but understood instinctively anyway - a genuine fighter when the situation called for it, a patient counsellor the rest of the time, someone who always seemed to know exactly what to say to whoever needed to hear it. And every version of that character, across more than forty years, was the same voice. Peter Cullen voiced Prime in the vast majority of Transformers TV and film, by a wide margin - the original cartoon, the ‘86 movie, all the way through the Michael Bay years, where the plots got louder and cheesier and Cullen’s performance never once did. He was the one constant in a franchise that changed everything else about itself repeatedly.
The Second Time #
Peter Cullen died last week at 85. I don’t know if he’d been unwell or if it came out of nowhere - the news didn’t say, and I’m not sure it matters. I saw the headline and it hit like a gut punch, which surprised me, because I don’t usually react to celebrity deaths at all. This one put me back in that theatre in 1986 for a second.
Scrolling through the comments under every article and post about it, the same four words kept showing up, over and over, from people I’d never met and never will: till all are one. It’s the line Optimus says as he’s dying in the ‘86 movie, the one that gutted me as a six year old and still catches in my throat as an adult, and finding it repeated a hundred times over by total strangers who apparently carry the exact same scar I do was its own strange comfort. I didn’t run out of a lobby this time. I just sat with it for a while - forty years of a voice that had been one of the steadiest, most consistent things in my life, gone. You could always tell he loved that role, took it seriously, and understood exactly what it meant to a six year old kid in the dark, and to everyone that kid grew up to be.
Till all are one.