The Energon Pub

Michael Delacy has alerted us to a very interesting article posted on Yahoo about the famous Orson Welles, and his work on Transformers: The Movie (1986). The article gives great insight into this influential actor/director, his past work and his part in the original Transformers Movie which turned out to be his very last. The article also looks ahead to the New Transformers Movie, opening July 3rd.

Read the article on Yahoo here.

WELLES: "Tell me about this character. What is my motivation?"
PRODUCER: "Well, it's a god that lumbers through space and eats everything in its path..."
WELLES: "That... is the story of my life...!"

Wow...stuff like that kinda makes me think that just the publicity this movie is churning out could end up making Transformers the next Star Wars wether people think it'll be really good or just mediocre.

cool article but it seems to imply they altered his voice because he was sick. when the fact is i'm pretty sure it would have been altered even if he was in good health. they wanted Unicron to have a cool deep voice so it would have been altered no matter his health or even who they woulda hired.

i'm nitpicky about these things yeah....lol but other than that its a cool article. so it made 6 million? that explains why it disappeared from theaters within a week here..lol its interesting though cuz when i first saw this movie i didnt like it at all...it didnt help that the while 90% of the autobots got wiped out the only decepticon to truly die was my favorite character, Starscream. but yeah so i didnt like it but then a year later it played on a saturday morning and i recorded it and loved it....i guess being 10yrs old made me more appreciative than when i was 9...lol and i still have that vhs tape, i didnt have enough room and ended up having to switch tapes so the last 30mins are on a second tape. and so i was missing about 10seconds worth of the sequence where Hot Rod and Kup are in jail. and to further push this into nostalgia, i'd watch the movie a lot over the years before finally finding it in stores and the commercials were all for my little pony and potato head kids and GI joe and of course transformers. ah yes, memories....lol

Welles ROCKS!!!!!

Ahh! They're helping ruin my favorite movie trivia question by making more people aware of it.

Bouncy X wrote:cool article but it seems to imply they altered his voice because he was sick. when the fact is i'm pretty sure it would have been altered even if he was in good health. they wanted Unicron to have a cool deep voice so it would have been altered no matter his health or even who they woulda hired.

i'm nitpicky about these things yeah....lol but other than that its a cool article. so it made 6 million? that explains why it disappeared from theaters within a week here..lol its interesting though cuz when i first saw this movie i didnt like it at all...it didnt help that the while 90% of the autobots got wiped out the only decepticon to truly die was my favorite character, Starscream. but yeah so i didnt like it but then a year later it played on a saturday morning and i recorded it and loved it....i guess being 10yrs old made me more appreciative than when i was 9...lol and i still have that vhs tape, i didnt have enough room and ended up having to switch tapes so the last 30mins are on a second tape. and so i was missing about 10seconds worth of the sequence where Hot Rod and Kup are in jail. and to further push this into nostalgia, i'd watch the movie a lot over the years before finally finding it in stores and the commercials were all for my little pony and potato head kids and GI joe and of course transformers. ah yes, memories....lol

Um...they *DID* alter his voice for the movie. He was near death when he recorded his lines, and he was very slurred, not to mention sometimes incoherent.

I believe Flint Dille talks about it on the 20th. Anniversary DVD. (It was either the DVD, or an interview online, but he says it.)

That was an awesome article!

Nothing there I hadn't already heard. Still, interesting to re-read it sometimes.

rosebud.............*drops snow globe*

Welles' War of The Worlds broadcast is amazing to listen to.

Even now, it gives me chills to hear him telling of the spaceship slowly opening itself.

His Unicron was also very good.

Welles was a genius, pure and simple, and I really wonder what he would have contributed in terms of ideas if his health had been better. His voice overs could make anything more legit just by themselves... watch the Nostradamus flick, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, and you'll see what I mean.

And if any fellow Seibertronians are looking for a good flick to check out, they mention two great ones in this article, besides Citizen Kane. Touch of Evil is great, even though the make-up to make Charlton Heston is a little distracting. But The Third Man is perhaps one of the greatest film noirs ever made. The most amazing part is, with the tremendous cast, Welles STILL manages to steal it with his performance, including one some of the best lines in film history.

(Sorry to kind of go off, but it's rare I have a chance to prattle on about film noir and Orson Welles movies, which this article gives me a chance to do.)

KoH4711 wrote:Welles was a genius, pure and simple, and I really wonder what he would have contributed in terms of ideas if his health had been better. His voice overs could make anything more legit just by themselves... watch the Nostradamus flick, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, and you'll see what I mean.

And if any fellow Seibertronians are looking for a good flick to check out, they mention two great ones in this article, besides Citizen Kane. Touch of Evil is great, even though the make-up to make Charlton Heston is a little distracting. But The Third Man is perhaps one of the greatest film noirs ever made. The most amazing part is, with the tremendous cast, Welles STILL manages to steal it with his performance, including one some of the best lines in film history.

(Sorry to kind of go off, but it's rare I have a chance to prattle on about film noir and Orson Welles movies, which this article gives me a chance to do.)

No issues with me man.

I remember seeing "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" when I was younger, very, very entertaining stuff.

But yeah, Welles=Genius. No doubt about it.

YouFearGalvatron wrote:No issues with me man.

I remember seeing "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" when I was younger, very, very entertaining stuff.

But yeah, Welles=Genius. No doubt about it.

There's a part of that I remember to this day: Talk about a prediction Nostradamus made about a giant quake in California, and man becoming man-eater, complete with creepy artwork. That, and Welles talking about the third World War, I had nightmares about that. Probably didn't help I saw it when I was REAL little, but still... =p

KoH4711 wrote:

YouFearGalvatron wrote:No issues with me man.

I remember seeing "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" when I was younger, very, very entertaining stuff.

But yeah, Welles=Genius. No doubt about it.

There's a part of that I remember to this day: Talk about a prediction Nostradamus made about a giant quake in California, and man becoming man-eater, complete with creepy artwork. That, and Welles talking about the third World War, I had nightmares about that. Probably didn't help I saw it when I was REAL little, but still... =p

Hey, same here. Say what you want, but Nostradamus wasn't far off in his predictions.

I hate that he hated being in that movie. Still its pretty messed up that he die before he could have seen it, I wonder if it would have changed his mind?

These are things that ad to the legacy of Transformers, a legacy that Hasbro seems to want to kill with each new series.

KoH4711 wrote:Welles was a genius, pure and simple, and I really wonder what he would have contributed in terms of ideas if his health had been better. His voice overs could make anything more legit just by themselves... watch the Nostradamus flick, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, and you'll see what I mean.

And if any fellow Seibertronians are looking for a good flick to check out, they mention two great ones in this article, besides Citizen Kane. Touch of Evil is great, even though the make-up to make Charlton Heston is a little distracting. But The Third Man is perhaps one of the greatest film noirs ever made. The most amazing part is, with the tremendous cast, Welles STILL manages to steal it with his performance, including one some of the best lines in film history.

(Sorry to kind of go off, but it's rare I have a chance to prattle on about film noir and Orson Welles movies, which this article gives me a chance to do.)

Also check out the following:
The Lady From Shagahi
The Stranger
The Trial
F for Fake
Mr. Akadin

"You belong to me, now...."

Welles was awesome.

It's funny but because he was in the movie, he did such a great job that everyone that knows the movie learned more about him because they liked his performance. It only made him more famous in the long run. He was probably just mad because he felt he should have directed the movie. He obviously liked the part enough to take the role, right? If he felt it was that bad not even money would change his mind I would think. But I guess no one will ever know.

Liege Evilmus wrote:I hate that he hated being in that movie. Still its pretty messed up that he die before he could have seen it, I wonder if it would have changed his mind?

These are things that ad to the legacy of Transformers, a legacy that Hasbro seems to want to kill with each new series.

The article didn't say he hated it....just that he thought of it as a job. & IIRC on the DVD, they said he thought it was kinda funny that the big fat guy was playing an entire planet.

Anyway, I don't think too many of the VA's in the cartoon or movie thought of it as anything but a job. Hell, every time Peter Cullen's asked about what he thought when he found out Prime was going to die, he says he turned to Welker & said, " Hey, Frank, they're killing me!! There goes my car payments!!!" The thing is there weren't too many people that knew how popular the series was...lack of internet & such...they never got any feedback. Now they get tons of it, & a lot of the original VA's are humbled by how much their parts meant to people. My guess is if he were still around today, he would be in a similar boat to some of the other VA's that were humbled at how many people fondly remembered their part in something they thought of as just a job.

Autobot032 wrote:

KoH4711 wrote:

YouFearGalvatron wrote:No issues with me man.

I remember seeing "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow" when I was younger, very, very entertaining stuff.

But yeah, Welles=Genius. No doubt about it.

There's a part of that I remember to this day: Talk about a prediction Nostradamus made about a giant quake in California, and man becoming man-eater, complete with creepy artwork. That, and Welles talking about the third World War, I had nightmares about that. Probably didn't help I saw it when I was REAL little, but still... =p

Hey, same here. Say what you want, but Nostradamus wasn't far off in his predictions.

Some, yes.

But man WILL be an eater of men. They theorize that the next world war will not be fought over land, but over food and water. It will be a battle between the haves (us), and the have-nots (3rd world countries).

The rate of overpopulation does not help matters, eithier.

So, yeah, just keep having lots of children everyone. We will get to canabalism soon enough!

I give us 100 years, that is if no huge natural disaster like a plague or firestorm does not cull the population suffeciently before then.

I am betting that we will not be stopped. Just a guess.

Nemesis Cyberplex wrote:

Liege Evilmus wrote:I hate that he hated being in that movie. Still its pretty messed up that he die before he could have seen it, I wonder if it would have changed his mind?

These are things that ad to the legacy of Transformers, a legacy that Hasbro seems to want to kill with each new series.

The article didn't say he hated it....just that he thought of it as a job. & IIRC on the DVD, they said he thought it was kinda funny that the big fat guy was playing an entire planet.

Anyway, I don't think too many of the VA's in the cartoon or movie thought of it as anything but a job. Hell, every time Peter Cullen's asked about what he thought when he found out Prime was going to die, he says he turned to Welker & said, " Hey, Frank, they're killing me!! There goes my car payments!!!" The thing is there weren't too many people that knew how popular the series was...lack of internet & such...they never got any feedback. Now they get tons of it, & a lot of the original VA's are humbled by how much their parts meant to people. My guess is if he were still around today, he would be in a similar boat to some of the other VA's that were humbled at how many people fondly remembered their part in something they thought of as just a job.

I agree, and most of these guys do have a sense of humor about themselves. As for Cullens quote, man go to YouTube and start looking up some 80's cartoons, he was in pretty much all of them, this was just another job for him. Also I know I'm gonna take a hit for this, but read even more of pretty much any Cullens interveiw, and you'll see it wasn't untill some time later that he even realized Prime was worth caring about, it was just another roll he put away. If you think I'm wrong, maybe I am, but I'm a pretty good judge of character, and if he had realy cared about the roll in the moment, he'd probably have more than the same one or two stories.

As for Wells, the man was a true Oscar calibur genius, and going from the DVD, stating things like he'd be playing a toy, and it was just his job to read the lines and productions job to make it sound good, well, those are pretty good indications that you aren't enthusiastic about your new roll as a toy, which ironicly wasn't made till nearly 20 years latter.

Don't get me wrong though, G1 Prime, was great and I'm glad to see him back. I also love the well writen, every elegantly evil line Unicron uttered. But there is another world between those classic lines.

I'm not going to be dellusional about it... Orson Wells would never have liked any incarnation of Transformers, and he certainly would not have liked to see the movie he was part of.

The man was an artist. A genius. From a cineastic standpoint, the 1986 animated movie is pretty poor. He would've been embarassed by it.

Creature SH wrote:I'm not going to be dellusional about it... Orson Wells would never have liked any incarnation of Transformers, and he certainly would not have liked to see the movie he was part of.

The man was an artist. A genius. From a cineastic standpoint, the 1986 animated movie is pretty poor. He would've been embarassed by it.

Nay nay, not just from a cinematic standpoint. No. It's pretty poor all around.

Autobot032 wrote:

Creature SH wrote:I'm not going to be dellusional about it... Orson Wells would never have liked any incarnation of Transformers, and he certainly would not have liked to see the movie he was part of.

The man was an artist. A genius. From a cineastic standpoint, the 1986 animated movie is pretty poor. He would've been embarassed by it.

Nay nay, not just from a cinematic standpoint. No. It's pretty poor all around.

Autobot032, just wondering here, is there ANYTHING about Transformers that you like?

Just curious, as you seem so pessimistic about the new film, the old film, and...everything in general.