40 Years of Transformers: Remembering Peter Cullen, Chester Bennington and the Hasbro childhood

Today, September 17, is Transformers Day, and this year marks four decades since iconic The Transformers: The Movie opened in cinemas in 1986, an anniversary Hasbro and Fathom Entertainment are celebrating with a restored 4K theatrical re-release of the animated film (which will almost certainly elude Indian screens). The anniversary is also particularly melancholic this year. Peter Cullen, the actor whose magnificent, unmistakably paternal rumble made Optimus Prime one of the most recognisable figures in children’s entertainment, died only three weeks ago at 85. The franchise itself had already been around for two years by the time the movie released, having begun in 1984 when Hasbro brought its American Transformers line to market alongside the Marvel comic and animated series that gave shape to the Autobots, Decepticons and their war-torn homeworld of Cybertron. By the time my generation got hold of it though, all of that history was utterly immaterial. I was just a child standing in a toy store being presented with the proposition that a car was secretly a cool robot, and I saw no reason whatsoever to interrogate the premise. In fact, the less you interrogated it, the better it worked.That was the great cosmic trick of “More Than Meets the Eye”. Transformers taught children like me that the world around us might actually be considerably more interesting than adults were letting on. A truck on the highway was still a truck, obviously, but there was now a non-zero chance that it was also a Cybertronian, and that faint possibility was enough to make every long car journey a little more memorable. A still from ‘Transformers’ | Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures For me, Transformers began with my grandmother. For most of my childhood, whenever she came visiting, she would take me to the local toy store and let me choose something. Looking at the collection I accumulated before turning ten, she must have visited approximately fifty times. In retrospect, this was an extraordinary arrangement for me and a fairly ruinous one for her wallet.Transformers came to me perfectly positioned between my progression through toys. I had just graduated from a fairly serious Hot Wheels fixation and would eventually move on to Lego, so I was already primed for tiny machines and then for the pleasure of taking things apart and putting them together again. Transformers somehow fed both appetites in the same piece of plastic, then threw in the decisive fantasy that made the whole thing irresistible: the car was alive. It was a toy with a built-in identity crisis, and at that age, I considered this the coolest thing to ever exist.The toys made that fantasy wonderfully tactile because every Transformer had its own little temperament to learn. You had to discover which panel moved first, which limb had to be tucked somewhere nonsensical, and how much force a particular hinge was willing to tolerate before it threatened dismemberment. Once I knew a figure well enough, my hands moved through its transformation on autopilot while my brain had already moved on to the battle I was about to stage. The real Transformers cinematic universe actually existed long before Hollywood got involved, and it transpired across my bedroom floor and the living-room carpet, where just a handful of toys could generate lore dense with dynastic grudges and battle strategies with frankly, Sun Tzu-levels of seriousness. Every Transformer possessed years of invented history that I was obliged to honour for the sake of continuity. And when lunch finally interrupted a campaign, the battlefield stayed exactly where it was, with figures sprawled across the carpet and fallen soldiers waiting exactly where I had left them. That kind of play feels increasingly antique now. I have a hard time imagining this iPad-addicted, Fortnite-rotted, Cocomelon generation possessing the particular strain of imagination required to turn an afternoon with a few toys into something so elaborate and legendary. (Good lord, I’ve become the old man shaking his fist at the youth).My own golden period was Transformers: Cybertron, the 2005 series and toyline that closed out the Unicron Trilogy after Armada and Energon. The Cyber Keys gave the toys an extra layer of physical interactivity, activating weapons and other gimmicks built into the figures, while the series’ different planets gave the line a sprawling sense of lore that made the toy box feel considerably bigger than it actually was. My first Transformer was Excellion, a red Autobot sports car, and from there my collection expanded with an unchecked enthusiasm that became difficult to defend once you are old enough to understand the concept of money. I accumulated Autobots, Decepticons, Mini-Cons and Dinobots, although Sky Shadow, a huge Ultra Class Decepticon that transformed into a military aircraft, eventually became my favourite. The boxed Sky Shadow from Hasbro’s 2005 Transformers: Cybertron line, alongside the included collectible plant map in each box | Photo Credit: Ebay The Cybertron line made the most of tactility, with substantially chunky figures and those iconic physical planet maps that extended the TV show’s mythology onto my bedroom floor. Those little details now feel precious because they belonged to an era when the boundary between a television show and a toy could still be bridged by a piece of printed material. The franchise existed simultaneously on the screen, in the toy box and inside your head, with each version feeding the others.Then Michael Bay’s Transformers heralded a whole new era and changed the game.I was seven years old, which meant that the announcement of a live-action Transformers movie was a civilisation-changing event. The anticipation was extraordinary because the prospect involved something my childhood had always promised but never quite delivered: the machines from the toy box were going to become physically convincing objects on a gigantic movie screen. The film would have real cars, real soldiers, real explosions and giant alien robots whose metallic bodies would have to look convincing enough to make the impossible seem briefly plausible.The toys changed with the movies. Cybertron still had the bulky Japanese robot design, with bright colours and silhouettes you could identify from across the room, but Bay’s films pushed Transformers toward a kind of mechanical overpopulation, filling every robot with interlocking panels and exposed machinery. It was peak late-2000s blockbuster excess, when Hollywood seemed determined to demonstrate that CGI could make even the most preposterous thing look physically present, and Industrial Light & Magic’s work helped set that standard by making these enormous digital machines look genuinely convincing, even earning the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. The first trilogy of films including Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Dark of the Moon (2011) was simultaneously military science fiction, adolescent fantasy, car commercial, rock video and enormous summer blockbuster; and the unbridled confidence with which they merged all those identities is one reason the era remains so easy to remember. Optimus Prime in a still from ‘Transformers’ | Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures But the soothing balm amid all that sensory assault was Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime. Cullen had voiced the character since the original 1980s cartoon, so his return in Bay’s films gave the new franchise a sturdy umbilical cord to the old one. Cullen based his basso-profundo interpretation partly on his older brother Larry, a Marine Corps veteran who advised him during his original audition to make Optimus “strong enough to be gentle,” and that became the most consequential pieces of character direction in the history of the franchise. His Optimus could sound imposing without sounding cruel, paternal without becoming saccharine, and sufficiently formidable to fold a Decepticon into the pavement while still possessing an Iron Giant-like gentleness.That core philosophy is why Optimus Prime has endured as such a potent cultural figure. He is an enormous weapon who regards power as a responsibility, having watched his civilisation collapse and survived a war that repeatedly gives him reasons to answer violence with more violence. His defining instinct remains the preservation of life, and his idea of freedom extends to anyone capable of consciousness, regardless of species or allegiance. Optimus is a survivor of catastrophic violence and the literal genocide of his people, who refuses to turn his survival into an excuse for cruelty. He is a being capable of infinite empathy.I can still picture him staring into the sunset as Cullen delivers that final, poignant monologue before the 2007 film cuts to the credits set to Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done”. To this day, the opening riff of that song produces a Pavlovian response in me, instantly summoning Optimus against that horizon, and that overwhelming conviction of being seven years old and witnessing the most awe-inspiring thing I had ever seen. That image remains one of the most defining movie-going memories of my childhood. Which brings me to Chester Bennington and Linkin Park, because Transformers is probably the single greatest contributor to my crippling nu-metal addiction. For millions of people who grew up with the 2007 film, Linkin Park became fused with the franchise almost by osmosis. But there is also something fitting about Chester’s place in that memory because the sheer physical power of his voice sounded capable of flattening a city, yet it came from a man whose gentleness was one of the qualities people remembered most vividly about him. That essentially felt like the Optimus Prime philosophy translated into rock music: immense destructive capacity kept on a very short leash by an unreasonable capacity for tenderness. That striking contrast is probably why the pairing made such an impression on me in the first place. “What I’ve Done” now carries memories of two summers at once — the summer of 2007, when I first heard it over Optimus Prime, and the knowledge of what happened ten years later, when Chester died. With Peter Cullen’s death, the sadness attached to Chester feels even more tightly bound to the same piece of childhood.My fond nostalgia is only one small tributary feeding into the enormous affection people have accumulated for Transformers over four decades. What gets me now is how much of that affection was earned while we were completely distracted by the toys themselves. These were spectacularly cool pieces of plastic after all, and I spent a significant portion of my childhood making them crash into each other. Somewhere inside all that metal and mayhem though, Transformers was teaching me a surprisingly decent way to be a person. The confluence of all these people and ideas that worked to bring it alive made empathy feel instinctive, even when the characters doing the empathising were giant alien robots.I do sometimes wonder how many kids could use a little Transformers in their lives now. The franchise gave me heroes whose humanity had very little to do with being human, shaped my understanding of what made someone worth looking up to, left me with the fondest childhood memories and for reasons I still cannot adequately explain to my poor neighbours at 3 AM, handed me a musical gateway drug. The funniest and most moving thing about it all is that I never actually noticed any of it happening because I was simply having the time of my life.Perhaps there really has always been more to Transformers than meets the eye.