respawnhero wrote:I know that Optimus Prime died in the movie but didn't they bring him back to life? I can't really remember because I was so young and have forgotten but now with a new found interest in Transformers. I don't know if it was during Generation 2 when they brought him back but I would really like to know. Thank You all.
As has already been mentioned, yes, Optimus Prime did indeed come back to life in the old G1 cartoon. First he appeared briefly as what was essentially a zombie in "Dark Awakening," but at the conclusion of the episode, it looked like that the spaceship he was on crashed into a star (or possibly some sort of planet as the animation was kind of inconsistent when they later referenced the episode, so it's hard to say for certain what it was). Then later, in the two part episode, "The Return of Optimus Prime," it was revealed that the human, Marissa Fairborne, rescued Prime's body from the ship before it crashed, and then Sky Linx convinced the Quintessons to restore Prime to life.
After that, the G1 cartoon didn't last long. It had a multi-part episode called "The Rebirth," which introduced the Headmasters, and which was intended to begin a fourth season, but the show was canceled at that point.
The Japanese continued the series (omitting Rebirth from the continuity), but one of the first things they did was kill Optimus Prime off again. After the Japanese series ran another three seasons (Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory) and a special (Zone), it was canceled, with Prime still dead. But then in an official print story called Battlestars, which was set in the animated continuity, Prime came back to life again as Star Convoy ("Convoy" being the Japanese version of his name).
You also asked if Prime was brought back to life in G2, but as far as the cartoon was concerned, G2 was nothing more than reruns of the old G1 series with new, CGI bumps between some of the scenes. In the comics, however, G2 was a new continuation of the G1 comic series, but then again, the comics are a completely separate continuity from the cartoon, and in the comics, Prime died and was brought back to life multiple times.
So there's some more details on what had already been posted. I hope some of it helped.