The Constant Death In Transformers: The Movie Even Caught The Cast Off Guard
"The Transformers: The Movie" exists in the shadow of "Star Wars." The young Autobot Hot Rod's ascension to Rodimus Prime parallels Luke Skywalker becoming a Jedi, Arcee's head is modeled after Leia's bun hairstyle, and the film's Orson Welles-voiced villain, Unicron, is a mechanical planet that eats other planets — it's like the Death Star, but if it were a Transformer.
"Star Wars" didn't become the media franchise of the world because of its box office haul, but largely because of merchandise sales. Toy companies made a killing on "Star Wars" action figures, among them Hasbro, owner of "Transformers." Partly thanks to "Star Wars," movies and TV shows began to be designed to include characters and vehicles that could be turned into toys. "The Transformers" and its sister show, "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero," were the epitome of this — they were literal toy commercials disguised as cartoons, made possible by the FCC loosening advertising regulations in 1983.
This toy-marketing-as-entertainment exercise reached a gallingly cynical apex with 1986's "The Transformers: The Movie," where the Autobots and Decepticons from the first two seasons of the TV series are killed off and replaced by new characters. Why? Because those toys were no longer on shelves and Hasbro wanted to sell its 1986 toy line.
How did the "Transformers" voice cast react to what's been called "The Great Toy Massacre of 1986"? Turns out, they were almost as shocked as the young audience who saw their favorite action figures hacked to death on the big screen.
Inadvertently killing icons
In a behind-the-scenes feature discussing the making of "The Transformers: The Movie," actor Neil Ross claims the cast wasn't given scripts in advance, so they were naturally taken by surprise when characters started dying: "So we show up and they pass out the scripts and it's like –- you know, we're doing the Pat Fraley thing, you know, 'BS, BS, my line. BS, BS, my line...' And suddenly we're going, 'Wait a minute! I die? Wally [Burr, the voice director]!' You know? And it was like consternation all around as 'It says here I die!' Yeah, that's kind of what it says."
Ross was actually one of the lucky ones — he was voicing Springer, Dinobot Slag, and the Constructicons Bonecrusher and Hook. The first of them was a shiny new toy, and his previous characters had all been spared. Not everyone in the cast was so fortunate though.
Peter Cullen was part of the unlucky group. Cullen voiced Optimus Prime and the Autobot leader's right-hand Ironhide, both of whom met their end in "The Transformers: The Movie." Prime's death proved especially unpopular. Cullen, for his part, wasn't pleased: "I hated it, I really did [...] I was standing with Frank Welker [the voice of Megatron] and we were reading our lines. I got to page, I don't know, 17, and I said, 'Hey Frank... I'm getting whacked on page 17! ... Wait a minute, I'm not coming back! Ooooh, there go the car payments.'"
When Cullen learned years later of the backlash to Prime's death, his feelings soured even more. As Ross put it in the aforementioned interview, "I don't think they realized what they had with Peter Cullen and Optimus Prime, I mean now they do, but back then, 'Oh kill him off no problem.' But kids loved that character, they loved what Peter did." As a result, Optimus Prime was resurrected in the subsequent third season of the ongoing TV show, returning just in time to close out the series.
Moving away from death
During "The Transformers: The Movie," 13 characters die onscreen — seven Autobots and six Decepticons. (Megatron's reincarnation as Galvatron and Ultra Magnus' easily-remedied demise do not count.) According to recovered storyboards, a few more characters were set to be killed off and were saved only because these scenes were deleted from the film.
"The Transformers" season 3 writer Flint Dille recounts, "At one point in our script, we had the entire '85 Autobot toyline attack, basically, the Decepticons who are blocking their way to the center of Cybertron. It was just this charge of the Light Brigade and the whole product line gets wiped out. It never occurred to us there was a kind of loyalty and fanaticism for the characters."
Well, Hasbro definitely knows that now. After a similarly gratuitous 'kill 'em all' story in Marvel's "The Transformers" #50, the franchise moved away from such events. Later iterations of the series also tend to reuse characters from the original 1984 toy line first and foremost, as if acknowledging they shouldn't have been replaced in the first place. The only 1986 characters to slip through were Hot Rod, Ultra Magnus, and Arcee. (Until the late 2010s, "Transformers" was lacking in female representation and Arcee became the go-to "Girl Autobot" by default.)
The one character who has continued to die is, shockingly, Optimus Prime. However, those deaths have always been followed by swift resurrections. In fact, succumbing to and then defying death only add to Optimus' immortality. Not bad for a character once written off as yesterday's product.