Forget Buying Toys, the Original Transformers Cartoon Just Wanted You to Be a Good Person

Since it began in 1984, 40 years ago this year, The Transformers has always had an uncomfortably close relationship with a particularly gross, child-exploiting branch of capitalism — the one that creates cartoon mascots who are driven insane by how delicious sugary cereal is, the one that puts prizes in Happy Meal boxes, and, of course, the one that creates entire TV shows and movies built around selling toys like G.I. Joe or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Like The Transformers, those shows were all part of an '80s cartoon boom triggered by the way Ronald Reagan’s far-right FCC decided to dramatically roll back protections against advertisements directed at children.

As a toy line, Transformers exists because Hasbro saw the value in licensing a couple of different Japanese toy brands that happened to be about things turning into robots — cars and jets, plus stereos and handguns — but the show, and therefore the main reason we’re still talking about The Transformers today, really only exists because Ronald Reagan figured that the free market would regulate itself in regards to how much advertising pointed at kids was too much (it turns out that the free market believes that kids can put up with a whole lot).

And while toy/cartoon brands like G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe are still around in one form or another (mostly, believe it or not, as toys), they never managed to transcend their bleak, Reagan-y origin. The Transformers is different, because it accidentally — or at least inadvertently, as far as Hasbro was surely concerned — had something to say with a little more heart than “buy toys.” And it’s pretty much all because of one big guy who can turn into a truck: Optimus Prime, the heroic leader of the Autobots, who brought a form of non-toxic masculinity to children’s programming long before that was really a thing. 

Compared to contemporaries like Duke from G.I. Joe or He-Man from Masters of the Universe, Optimus isn’t just the toughest or smartest or most powerful character among the Good Guys. The movies generally miss the point by making him something like Rambo crossed with the Incredible Hulk, but the Optimus of the cartoon — referred to as “Generation 1” or “G1” among the faithful — is more of a noble father figure to the other robots and their various little human friends. He’s a military leader, sure, but he’s not a conqueror or an invader.

That personality has been built into Optimus from the very beginning. As detailed in retrospective works like Netflix’s The Toys That Made Us, Hasbro tasked Marvel Comics with coming up with a marketable backstory for The Transformers, leading to the very smart idea of basing it around two competing franchises (so if you buy a good guy toy, you need a bad guy toy to go with it). Dennis O’Neil, one of the most influential comic book writers of all time, supposedly came up with the name “Optimus Prime,” but writer Bob Budiansky spent a weekend (one weekend, repeated for emphasis) inventing everything else. 

Budiansky’s simple plot outlines and characterizations formed the basis of Marvel’s original Transformers comics (which differed wildly from the cartoon), but he’s also credited with the original one-line “bios” that appeared on the packages for Transformers toys. Most of those are about making the characters seem cool or exciting, like how the G1 bio for Bumblebee, the cute guy everyone loves, says “the least likely can be the most dangerous.” Jazz, who you know is cool because he’s named Jazz, has one that says “do it with style or don’t bother doing it.” On the bad guy side, Starscream’s bio features this proto-edgelord trash: “Conquest is made of the ashes of one’s enemies.” Optimus Prime’s bio, meanwhile, is not about killing or fighting or being cool at all. It is, simply: “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.”

How many other leaders in pop culture — hell, how many leaders in the real world — have consistently stood for an ideal like that? G.I. Joe attempted something similar in its theme song, which features the lyrics “He’ll fight for freedom, wherever there’s trouble,” but, paired with the “Real American Hero” tagline, it suggests CIA-backed coups and endless wars in the Middle East more than the call for social justice implied by Prime’s bio. 

Now imagine a generation of children getting roped in by the appeal of robots that turn into other things only to find out that the main robot, the bravest and most well-respected of the bunch, is an advocate for general equality among all living things (be they white or Black or men or women or Autobots or Decepticons). That’s not to say G1 Transformers fans grew up to be kinder people than anyone else, but they at least more primed for it than the average cartoon-obsessed ’80s kid.

But a lot of those initial character bios were just tossed off (again, Budiansky did it in a weekend), and there’s not a ton of nuance in the average episode of the Transformers cartoon (the Decepticons are burning rainforests or whatever for energy, the Autobots beat them up, the end), so one could make the argument that this is all just reinterpreting a lovably dopey TV show to make it seem like it was smarter than it was… if not for Optimus Prime’s voice actor Peter Cullen.

At this year’s Children’s and Family Emmy Awards, Cullen received a lifetime achievement Emmy for his work as Optimus (fittingly presented to him by previous recipient and Megatron voice actor Frank Welker), and during his acceptance speech he told a story he has told many times in the four decades since he first gave a voice to one of pop culture’s most famous trucks.

As the story goes, Cullen wasn’t sure what a “superhero truck” would sound like, so he asked his brother Larry, a former Marine, for advice. Larry, who had served in Vietnam, told him that if he was going to be a hero — truck or otherwise — he should be a “real hero” and not just go around “yelling and screaming and pretending you’re a tough guy.” Instead, Larry said his brother should “be strong enough to be gentle.” Taking that to heart, Cullen decided to model his Optimus Prime voice after his own hero: his brother Larry.

And Cullen’s voice perfectly embodies the warmth and kindness (and the strength involved in being that warm and that kind) suggested by that character bio. He doesn’t bark orders at the other Autobots and he doesn’t admonish them when they fail, the way Megatron pointedly does in every episode. He supports his friends and allies and encourages them like a good leader should. It’s some basic stuff in terms of making a noble hero, but using a show that was explicitly designed to sell toys to present that kind of model for children to look up to was (and still is) quietly revolutionary — maybe even because of the fact that it doesn’t seem intentional. It all adds to the undeniable magic of Optimus Prime, a hero who is so inherently Good-with-a-capital-G that he transcends the horrible economic policies that made his existence possible in the first place.

Optimus Prime represents the idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings, and, for 40 years now, The Transformers has represented the idea that good things can come from even the bleakest situations. 

Sam Barsanti has written about pop culture for 10 years. He canonically exists in the Arrowverse.