Forty years ago, Hasbro was warned. Now they’re sending Transformers: The Movie on an “Apology Tour” at a theater near you.
Back in the mid-1980s, when Hasbro was looking to turn its hit TV show and toy-selling juggernaut Transformers into a big theatrical animated motion picture, the man the company had tapped to write the film had one major qualm.
“I warned them,” screenwriter Ron Friedman told me, when I interviewed him for MEL Magazine in 2021. “I told Hasbro, ‘You can’t kill Optimus Prime,’ because he was ‘big daddy’ in the mythological narrative. He was Odin or Zeus and you can’t kill him off, the family will fall apart.”
But Hasbro insisted. By 1986, the company had sold all the Optimus Prime toys it could after two seasons of the Saturday morning cartoon, so a new leader with a new toy was needed. For Transformers: The Movie, Hasbro even gave Optimus’ replacement a similar name: Rodimus Prime.
“What I tried to do with Rodimus Prime was come up with a character who was interesting enough so that maybe people would like him enough just to get through the movie without rebelling in the theater, attacking the ushers and setting fire to the box office,” Friedman said.
In that regard, Friedman barely succeeded. Originally, the movie began with Optimus’ death, but Friedman convinced Hasbro to push it back a little bit to give it greater impact. Plus, Friedman had developed a rather touching way to kill off the beloved Autobot leader. As Optimus dies, his bright red and blue colors fade from his body, leaving his lifeless body as a gray hunk of metal.
Despite all that, Transformers: The Movie still deeply upset Transformers fans by killing Optimus Prime at the end of the first act. “The kids were crying in the theaters,” story consultant Flint Dille said during a commentary track for the film. “We heard about people leaving the movie. We were getting a lot of nasty notes about it.”
Over the past four decades, there has been a bit of a reevaluation of Transformers: The Movie. Fans have embraced it as the kind of big, beautiful, 2D animated film that just isn’t made anymore. Persaonlly, I’d go so far as to say that I think the thing that upset people the most about it, Optimus’ death, may have been the best thing about it, as it proved the Autobots hero was a character people cared about, especially in a franchise where a lot of characters amounted to cannon fodder.
Even Friedman, who also helped write the earliest episodes of the Transformers cartoon, admitted to me, “There were so many fucking characters in that show that it was hard to get to know them.”
Friedman, who I befriended in the last few years of his life before he passed in 2025, even made his own little cottage industry out of the moment, calling his memoir I Killed Optimus Prime. At conventions and in interviews, he delighted in telling the story, “I’ve gotten it a hundred times. People will come up to me and say, ‘You son of a bitch. I was seven years old and went to go see the Transformers movie, and you killed Optimus Prime!’ Then, they follow that up with, ‘Will you please sign my underwear?’”
If anything, the complex legacy around Transformers: The Movie is why, for the 40th anniversary of the film, Hasbro has teamed with Fathom for an “Apology Tour” re-release beginning on Sept. 17. They even have a new poster highlighting the moment of Optimus Prime’s death.
It’s the kind of thing I’d like to think Ron would have gotten a kick out of, even though he’s now in the same place he sent Optimus Prime 40 years ago.
I just don’t know how to feel about dead Transformers
From Transformers: The Movie to Rise of the Beasts, movies keep killing off Autobots. Do they care? Should we?
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Author: 360 Technology Group
