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In the summer of 1986, children were traumatized when Optimus Prime sacrificed himself to stop his archrival, Megatron. But it wasn’t Megatron who pulled the trigger, it was a writer named Ron Friedman.
Ron Friedman wrote Transformers: The Movie. He wrote the five-part miniseries that launched GI Joe. He is close friends with Stan Lee and helped Stan develop The Marvel Action Hour, featuring Iron Man and Fantastic Four. He has written episodes of All in the Family, Happy Days, and Fantasy Island. In addition to his writing credentials, Ron is an architect and a teacher at Chapman University.
In 2014, Ron plans to chronicle his experiences as a writer in the memoir, I Killed Optimus Prime. The book promises a fascinating look behind the scenes of the shows that defined our childhood.
I had the privilege of speaking with Ron about his career, his friendship with Stan Lee, what he thought when he first saw the Transformers, how Orson Welles became Unicron, and why he didn’t want to kill Optimus Prime.
So, to kick off the 30th Anniversary of the Transformers, click below to learn about Ron Friedman, the man who wrote the movie.
Optimus Prime was the transcendental figure that is the glue for every legend or story. The transcendental character of big daddy, big brother, your personal champion, the repository of all that is good and worthy. He was the true center of the Autobot family. I think about the gathering of various comic icons and their peers as families. Who was Megatron? The worst possible father figure. He topped King John in the days of Robin Hood. Who was Starscream? He’s Iago, the treacherous second in command, the bad uncle or younger brother who lusts after his older brothers wife. I recognized that I needed to assign family identities to characters in order to create the recognition factor that young people need. They cannot verbalize this; it’s beneath the surface. To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove Daddy from the family, that’s wasn’t going to work. I told Hasbro and their lieutenants they would have to bring him back but they said no and had “great things planned.” In other words they were going to create new more expensive toys.
Sounds like what Captain Kirk was intended to be.El Duque wrote:Optimus Prime was the transcendental figure that is the glue for every legend or story. The transcendental character of big daddy, big brother, your personal champion, the repository of all that is good and worthy.
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
Rodimus Prime wrote:As for killing Optimus, because they had "great things planned," Rodimus is reviled by the majority of the fandom because he wasn't Optimus. To me that was 1 of the things that made me a fan. But he wasn't appealing to kids, and he was shoehorned into the role to sell toys by the writers at the order of Hasbro. So who's at fault of the general failure of Season 3 and its stories and characters?
Mkall wrote:Rodimus Prime wrote:As for killing Optimus, because they had "great things planned," Rodimus is reviled by the majority of the fandom because he wasn't Optimus. To me that was 1 of the things that made me a fan. But he wasn't appealing to kids, and he was shoehorned into the role to sell toys by the writers at the order of Hasbro. So who's at fault of the general failure of Season 3 and its stories and characters?
Says the poster named Rodimus Prime
As I said to Pete Sinclair, the truth is that Hasbro killed Optimus Prime. Nobody else would have had the authority to do so. Ron and Jay, Nelson and I were only acting under orders.
Haven't read the interview yet, but Secret Of Cyberton and Ron's script were both very seminal to the movie, but both were, in and of themselves, rejected but were extremely influential on the final movie which would be written over the next year or so.
We didn't work directly with Ron, he came before us. Rons was a brilliant warehouse of ideas, scenes and images... Many of which were used. And god knows, Ron owns a huge part of Transformers history. He had the task of trying to somehow merge a million requests from various people into one cogent script... He was the first one into the breach.
Jay and I were second and we stayed in the breach for well over a year.. We wrote 'secret' in a week in my apartment in a week. I was holed up the Grand Hyatt for Summer '85 (I think it was '85) rewriting and doing show stuff. It was an attempt to merge Ron's script with the show and too much 'Hero of A Thousand Faces' I'd consumed.
Tom and Joe couldn't wrap their head around the idea of Cybertron being a giant transforming Robot who was the only thing in the universe that could defeat Unicron.). And maybe they were right. That story wasn't about our toy heroes as much (though there was a glorious charge of the light brigade' that wiped out the 85 product line).
There's another lost version of the story and that was Nelson Shin's version of the script. I'm not sure whether it was a script or a storyboard.
As I said before, neither this script nor 99% of scripts anywhere is a virgin birth. They are all collaborations. This script was more collaborative than almost anything because there were so many people involved in the toys and the movie and the show. In some ways, everybody who worked on Season's 1 and 2 left some DNA in the movie.
He wrote the first draft of the movie, so he probably killed him first. Unless Joe or Jay dictated the plot, I'd have no idea about that. The thing that was ultimately really interesting from a franchise point of view was what happened after he was killed.
But that's another story
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
No, the robot mode of Cybertron they had planned for "The Secret of Cybertron" wasn't Primus, it was just Cybertron in a robot mode. Simon Furman created the Primus character two years after the movie came out, and the concept of Primus being Cybertron's robot mode wouldn't come about until... was it the early 2000s? Something like that.Rodimus Prime wrote:It's good to read Flint Dille's take on things, I usually take him at his word. From his comments, are we to understand that they had planned to reveal Primus as the robot mode of Cybertron even back then? And have an actual showdown with Unicron in the '86 movie?
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
Sabrblade wrote:No, the robot mode of Cybertron they had planned for "The Secret of Cybertron" wasn't Primus, it was just Cybertron in a robot mode. Simon Furman created the Primus character two years after the movie came out, and the concept of Primus being Cybertron's robot mode wouldn't come about until... was it the early 2000s? Something like that.Rodimus Prime wrote:It's good to read Flint Dille's take on things, I usually take him at his word. From his comments, are we to understand that they had planned to reveal Primus as the robot mode of Cybertron even back then? And have an actual showdown with Unicron in the '86 movie?
Jeep! wrote:Why do I imagine Dead Metal sounding exactly like Arnie?
Intah-wib-buls?
Blurrz wrote:10/10
Leave it to Dead Metal to have the word 'Pronz' in his signature.
Sabrblade wrote:No, the robot mode of Cybertron they had planned for "The Secret of Cybertron" wasn't Primus, it was just Cybertron in a robot mode. Simon Furman created the Primus character two years after the movie came out, and the concept of Primus being Cybertron's robot mode wouldn't come about until... was it the early 2000s? Something like that.Rodimus Prime wrote:It's good to read Flint Dille's take on things, I usually take him at his word. From his comments, are we to understand that they had planned to reveal Primus as the robot mode of Cybertron even back then? And have an actual showdown with Unicron in the '86 movie?
84forever wrote:"people do not understand what it is that is making them successful".
Autobots were cars, Decepticons were jets, tanks and big robots disguised as small items meant to deceive. There was a difference in the two factions fighting each other. Underdogs against impossible odds... poor little sports cars versus big bad military vehicles. In 1985 Hasbro got greedy and threw this winning formula out the window and Transformers has been in decline ever since. Even the hacks at IDW get this simple concept right with their creations. Drift is a car, Turmoil is a tank. Apparently IDW is even smarter than the fandom who voted into creation yet another AUTObot jet.
"once you establish an icon, you're a fool if you don't try to preserve it".
The 1984 cast are the true Transformers. Everything else is an imitation. The Transformers brand will not reach it's true potential until the season 1 Transformers are brought back. Plain and simple.
Jeep! wrote:Why do I imagine Dead Metal sounding exactly like Arnie?
Intah-wib-buls?
Blurrz wrote:10/10
Leave it to Dead Metal to have the word 'Pronz' in his signature.
84forever wrote:"people do not understand what it is that is making them successful".
Autobots were cars, Decepticons were jets, tanks and big robots disguised as small items meant to deceive. There was a difference in the two factions fighting each other. Underdogs against impossible odds... poor little sports cars versus big bad military vehicles. In 1985 Hasbro got greedy and threw this winning formula out the window and Transformers has been in decline ever since. Even the hacks at IDW get this simple concept right with their creations. Drift is a car, Turmoil is a tank. Apparently IDW is even smarter than the fandom who voted into creation yet another AUTObot jet.
"once you establish an icon, you're a fool if you don't try to preserve it".
The 1984 cast are the true Transformers. Everything else is an imitation. The Transformers brand will not reach it's true potential until the season 1 Transformers are brought back. Plain and simple.
18 Autobots vs. 10 Decepticons.84forever wrote:Underdogs against impossible odds...
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
No such thing exists. Being a "True Fan" in this fandom is a myth.84forever wrote:Lastly, anyone who likes anything from '88 is not a true fan
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
I guess you never heard of the Air warriors or Rainmakers? The Autobots were vastly outnumbered.Sabrblade wrote:"84forever: More GEEWUN than Rated X".![]()
No offense, X.
18 Autobots vs. 10 Decepticons.84forever wrote:Underdogs against impossible odds...
Totally "impossible odds".
Oh, you mean those background generics who don't matter and barely anyone gives two cents for?84forever wrote:I guess you never heard of the Air warriors or Rainmakers? The Autobots were vastly outnumbered.
Nah, you're just a Transformers fan, not a "true fan".84forever wrote:And yes, true fans do exist... I am real and alive.
And it's mindsets like that that suck the fun out of enjoying the whole brand instead of one selective insignificant-by-comparison fraction of it.84forever wrote:Too bad the real Transformers died 29 years ago!
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
84forever wrote:I guess you never heard of the Air warriors or Rainmakers? The Autobots were vastly outnumbered.Sabrblade wrote:"84forever: More GEEWUN than Rated X".![]()
No offense, X.
18 Autobots vs. 10 Decepticons.84forever wrote:Underdogs against impossible odds...
Totally "impossible odds".
And yes, true fans do exist... I am real and alive. Too bad the real Transformers died 29 years ago!
Jeep! wrote:Why do I imagine Dead Metal sounding exactly like Arnie?
Intah-wib-buls?
Blurrz wrote:10/10
Leave it to Dead Metal to have the word 'Pronz' in his signature.
Here's the article.Ultra Markus wrote:if a true fan is a myth then what is the definition of a true fan and what criteria does one have to meet to become this person?
Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
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