BW Vs That Park Place> The Optimus Prime Death Problem

For the 40th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie (the name mistake is easy given that the trailers in the day just called it Transformers: The Movie, but the TV series was The Transformers), Hasbro has decided to have a bit of fun with the part of the movie most 80s kids talk about, the death of Optimus Prime.

At the time, Hasbro didn’t realize how important the character has become to kids. One kid even grew up and legally changed his name to Optimus Prime because the character was more of a father than his biological one–and as far as I’m concerned a firefighter and Iraq War veteran has earned the right to call himself whatever the #$%^$# he wants. For kids in the 1980s, Optimus’ death, and that of other G1 characters they come to know and love, was a huge shock because it was nothing we were used to. For Hasbro, it was just a way to send off the old character and make the war look serious so they could sell new toys that kids didn’t own yet. The thought was everyone who wanted and could afford an Optimus Prime already had one, so it’s time to install a new leader, moving the series forward to the far off year of 2005 and introducing a new generation of Autobots and Decepticons to continue the war.

The plan was such a backfire that they brought Optimus back, first for a better attempt at torch-passing to Rodimus Prime in the episode “Dark Awakening”, and when that wasn’t enough just brought him back for good in “The Return Of Optimus Prime”, even giving him a brand new figure as one of the new Powermasters. Unless you were in Japan, which was more used to dead mentors, where they killed him off again in The Headmasters and used the Powermaster Optimus Prime mold to create the new character God Ginrai in Super God Masterforce. Their Optimus, or “Convoy” in Japan, would still get resurrected as Star Convoy, the inspiration for the final 13th Prime in current Hasbro lore, in the Battlestars manga and Return Of Convoy toyline from Takara we never got in the West.

I wasn’t going to write about it, maybe use the trailer for a Daily Video to go alongside my continuing look at the pitches for bringing the cartoon to CBS. Then came an article from That Park Place contributor HT Counter (like I’m one to question screennames). In his commentary he made the case that the apology, which is all in fun, wasn’t necessary, that killing Optimus was actually a good thing narratively. I wouldn’t go quite that far. Do I hate it? I have mixed feelings. I didn’t get to see the movie until it hit home video and TV, so between the comic adaptation and season 3 episodes I was already prepared for the big moment. On the other hand I don’t think he really has a grasp on what the problem actually was in the 1980s and how it affected the kids who sat through the movie. So allow me to add a different perspective.

Hot Rod did nothing wrong. Yes, you heard me, I said it, darnit! By now you’ve likely seen the news that Hasbro is rolling out a tongue-in-cheek 1986 Apology Tour for the 40th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie (1986).

What are they apologizing for, you may ask? Why, killing off Optimus Prime of course, one of the most beloved and iconic characters in Americana history.

During the mythical 80’s, Transformers was a societal juggernaut – and what better way to make oodles of money than to make a feature-length cartoon based on your wildly successful property? Thus, Transformers fans went ballistic when they found out a movie was being made, and broke down the cinema doors to see it on its opening day.

Understand how rare this was. Star Trek was getting movies but only years after the show had ended both the live-action and animated runs, which combined could be seen as their original five-year mission. He-Man/She-Ra and the GoBots followed, while the G.I. Joe movie ended up in direct to video and had to change the ending of Duke dying, figuring that if kids went this crazy over a robot, having a human hero die would be way too much. (Duke fans were happy.) TV shows getting a theatrical movie while the series is still on TV/streaming is still pretty rare, especially in the current way Hollywood creates shows and movies and the way the format pecking order has gotten divisive. So kids were ecstatic that one of their favorite shows was getting a big screen appearance with better animation than even season one could pull off when it only needed one episode a week instead of five.

However, what no one was expecting was that 1/3 of the way through the film, Optimus Prime – that quintessential father figure to thousands of kids, loses his fight to Megatron and croaks. Let’s rewind to that fateful scene on Earth: Optimus Prime has Megatron beaten down, gun in hand, ready to end the war once and for all. But unbeknownst to him, Megatron was just about to shoot him with a conveniently placed blaster. Hot Rod, seeing this, bursts in, gets grabbed, and becomes an unwilling human—er, Autobot shield. Megatron then shoots Prime in the robo-kidneys.

Ever since then, poor old Hot Rod has been constantly thrown under the truck….er…bus for being the one who “killed” Optimus.

Fans have blamed Hot Rod for decades. “If he hadn’t interfered…” they say. Blah blah. Let’s examine the facts, shall we?:

Hot Rod acted heroically: He saw his leader in danger and rushed in without hesitation. This is a sometimes foreign concept called “courage”, not recklessness. His colleague Kup warned him not to interfere, sure, but in the heat of battle hesitation can be fatal too, as it almost was in this case. Optimus would very likely have been shot anyway. Hot Rod showed gumption even if he lacked the experience.

I will agree that Hot Rod gets too much flak for getting in the way. It was just an excuse for Megatron to win over Optimus, and Megatron did win. He may have gone crazy but he did get a new body and a new chance at life. Optimus would have stayed dead if not for kids’ reactions. Then again, the anti-Hot Rod crowd does have one good point: Hot Rod could have found a better way than lunging at Megatron. Hot Rod was young and impetuous, but he also had guns on his arms which we saw him use earlier and his figure had a small rifle. Even throwing a rock or warning “he’s reaching for a gun” would have worked, but this was part of his character growth. Over the course of the movie we see him matured by the experiences he had. Just not enough to take command. I’ll get back to that but first…

The death was narratively essential: Killing Optimus wasn’t just toy-line refreshment (though yes, Hasbro needed new characters to sell). It raised the stakes of the film sky-high. Don’t forget Optimus wasn’t the only casualty. The movie was a relative robotic slaughterhouse. Prowl, Ironhide, Ratchet, Brawn, and even the entire planet of Lithone, wiped out in minutes.

Prime’s sacrifice gives the story weight: the Autobots lose their icon, forcing Hot Rod (and later Rodimus Prime) to step up. The Matrix passes to someone unready, flawed, and relatable. That’s powerful character development and generational change. Without Optimus’ death, the film is just a longer cartoon episode with more explosions.

First, remember that it’s not just one death. Like he said, some popular characters also die in a series where they could and were repaired. Prime has almost died more than once by this point, usually by Laserbeak’s actions more that Megatron’s. There’s even an episode where a team of Autobots has to find a way to and from Cybertron when only the Decepticons had such regular transport at the time to get a part Optimus needed to be repaired after a Laserbeak attack. So this still feels a bit odd in light of two seasons of repairs where nobody ever died. Suddenly that day the Decepticons stopped being the Star Wars stormtroopers and everyone from season one was scrap metal because season two toys were still selling.

Second, death in a kids show was already rare so this was the first time most kids saw it. They got away with it here because it was a movie and didn’t have to dance through as many hoops, plus they were robots. Later shows made the attempt. Bravestarr took the chance twice, having a kid overdose on drugs (complete with funeral) and my favorite episode where Bravestarr’s mentor is wanted for murder, and he’s totally guilty. We see everything but what’s left of the victim hitting the arena floor. Super Powers Team worked the best magic they could for network SatAM in bringing us Batman’s origin, though that’s one of my favorite Batman stories because of how Bruce reacts when he’s forced to face Crime Alley for the first time.

Then there’s Robotech, a show created from three Japanese productions. Like I said earlier, Japan is more used to having dead mentors even in kids action shows. For us, Roy Fokker’s death was shocking in ways it wasn’t for Macross fans near the same period. So they handled “Convoy’s” death better…once they finally got the movie. For them, he died offscreen before the third season, aka Transformers: 2010. For American kids who saw it in theaters without the spoilers I had before finally seeing it, the pain hurt a lot more.

It made the victory sweeter: Hot Rod (now Rodimus Prime) ultimately opens the Matrix, destroys Unicron, and becomes the new leader. His arc from brash kid to worthy successor only works because he carries the guilt of being the Peter Parker to Optimus’ Uncle Ben. The emotional payoff Stan Bush’s “The Touch” music playing as the voice of Optimus tells Rodimus to arise wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without the tragedy.

And it didn’t help. In a later paragraph he claims the return came with character assassination for Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime, but that’s where I have the biggest disagreement. Season three was doing that quite often. The idea was that Rodimus was forced into the leadership role before he was ready and had to sort of “learn on the job”. Lion-O in ThunderCats had a similar arc, except he actually wanted to be a good leader while Rodimus just wanted to be Hot Rod again. He didn’t have the same early grooming to be leader someday because he was never royalty. Unlike his tech spec, our young cavalier didn’t really show an interest in the rules.

What he did show in the movie was a desire to stop Decepticons, but we meet him fishing with Daniel, their young human friend and son of their longtime allies Spike and Carly. When the brush past Kup to see the ship landing, the old Autobot acts like this isn’t the first time. We see as the story grows the potential for leadership but in the series he clearly both wasn’t ready and wasn’t willingly taking on the role. Personally, I feel like having him become Rodimus was a mistake. During the movie Hot Rod learns he has the skills to be leader, but I would have rather seen him grow into his destined role. Maybe at the end of the movie the wisdom of the Matrix Of Leadership says he’s not ready yet despite defeating Unicron, but now he knows he needs to take his Autobot duties more seriously and someday become that worthy leader. Instead he’s clearly over his head as leader and by “The Return Of Optimus Prime”, the end of season 3, he didn’t show as much improvement in the role as he should have. It was almost a relief for both him and the audience to have Optimus back.

If you want real character assassination, look instead to who should have been Autobot leader at the end of the movie and season three, Ultra Magnus. He was Optimus’ hand module chosen successor. Ultra Magnus was ready but didn’t feel worthy to follow in Optimus Prime’s footsteps. (The idea that “Prime” was a title technically started with Rodimus, so he wasn’t Ultra Prime.) The movie then shows him to be as unworthy as he believed himself to be. I don’t include the “I can’t deal with that now” line as he was focused on saving his own ship and crew from the new Decepticons and how to deal with the monster planet that was planning on having Cybertron for dinner and already had the moons as a snack, with three more added to the body count (or so they believed at the time as Bumblebee, Jazz, and Spike were later rescued by Daniel as part of his subplot). Hot Rod’s ship going down, as much as he might have wanted it to be, wasn’t a priority. Then he gets himself blown up trying to stop Galvatron with the Matrix. By that point the shock was already gone since we already saw our childhood favorites in show and toy (Windcharger was my first Transformer) killed off in violent fashion or the corpse after the fact. He gets rebuilt by the Junkions and proceeds to do nothing the rest of the story for Hot Rod’s arc.

Seeing Ultra Magnus proven to be the leader Optimus expected him to be while Hot Rod began a season arc of becoming the next leader and balancing his youth with his destiny would have been far more interesting to me. Instead Rodimus Prime was never allowed to grow as a character, to become worthy of his destiny. Going back to Lion-O we see him mature until the “Lion-O’s Anointment” arc where he had to defeat his mentors and a great evil (guess who) to prove worthy of being Lord Of The ThunderCats in full and not just heredity. That growth didn’t take all season, but imagine if it did for Hot Rod, while Ultra Magnus had his own confidence issues to overcome. You have two bots who don’t feel ready but one is destined by “prophecy” despite his immaturity and the other by duty despite the footplates he was stepping into. It would have made both characters interesting, and with a more experienced leader still undergoing growing pains while Hot Rod got to be awesome in his own right, which we’ve seen in later incarnations and how Bumblebee has annoyingly become Hot Rod 2.0 in more recent shows like Robots In Disguise and Cyberworld.

Should Optimus have died? Maybe, maybe not. What really bothers me is THEY WON’T SCRAPPING STOP KILLING AND RESURRECTING HIM IN FICTION! There are less continuities where Optims doesn’t die and gets brought back, sometimes in the same story, than there are ones where he keeps doing the Jesus act. I don’t know who decided death and resurrection was part of Optimus’s iconography since it happened in the 1980s (both cartoon and Marvel comics run, who also did it more than once as did Japan!) but I’m as sick of it as I am Bumblebee losing his voice or being Hot Rod mark II. We can debate Optimus’ death back then but now it needs to STOP happening. Have Optimus send someone on a mission and then not be part of the mission if you want him out of the story for awhile. Cyber Missions did that, as did Rescue Bots. Have him go to Cybertron and put Prowl or Ultra Magnus in charge while he’s away, even if he’s away for a few stories. Or have him on the ruling council and put someone else in charge.

I’m not annoyed that he died in the movie, though I understand why kids were so hurt by it that they had to bring him back. Hasbro learned that the writers were creating good characters, which is how you sell the toys. For kids back then killing the mentor was not good, though now writers seem to know how to do it right (repetition, I guess) and choosing which characters to do so with. (In theory. We could stop killing Pa Kent, too.)  His alt mode should be a phoenix because it seems like the only thing writers do with him besides being the greatest Autobot leader is a constant death and rebirth cycle throughout the multiverse and I’m long past over it. The shock from the movie is long since gone. Let Optimus Prime live, I say.