Peter Cullen died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home at 85, according to multiple outlets, closing out one of the longest single-character runs in voice acting history. There's a decent chance Cullen's voice is more universally recognizable than his face ever was, which is sort of the whole point of the job he did better than anyone.
Rest in peace to the voice of Optimus Prime Peter Cullen
Cullen first became Optimus Prime in the 1984 animated series, and he never really let go of it. He carried the role through six more theatrical Transformers movies, including Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts, plus a mountain of TV shows, video games and toy commercials. Forty-plus years on one character is basically unheard of in any medium, let alone one where you're doing it entirely with your voice.
The origin story is the part that hits hardest. Cullen has said he based Optimus Prime's cadence on his older brother Larry, a decorated Marine who served in Vietnam and told him ahead of his audition not to play a typical tough-guy hero — real heroes, Larry told him, don't yell and act tough. That's the whole Optimus Prime voice in one sentence, and it's why it worked on multiple generations of kids who had no idea a soldier's advice was baked into a cartoon robot.
RIP to an iconic voice t.co/3LkbtODcFo
Cullen's résumé went well beyond Cybertron — he also voiced Eeyore in a long run of Winnie the Pooh projects, played King Kong in the 1976 remake, and did K.A.R.R. on Knight Rider. But nothing came close to Optimus Prime, a character he stuck with across four decades of Hasbro's biggest franchise while other actors came and went around him.
It says something that the tributes rolling in aren't just from Transformers die-hards. Cullen's Optimus was the moral center of a toy commercial that somehow became one of the most enduring pop-culture icons of the last 40 years, and that doesn't happen without the guy behind the mic actually meaning it.