Though it appears in both their scripts, a story beat neither writer can take credit for was the decision to kill off Autobot leader Optimus Prime and several other characters from the show, which had come from Hasbro’s top brass. “At the time, we thought that they were all mostly interchangeable and that all of them would be ‘discontinued’ and we’d just keep making more,” Dille says of the toyline. “We didn’t know – or speaking for myself – I didn’t know that Optimus [Prime] and Megatron and Bumblebee and Starscream were iconic characters. It seems pretty stupid now, but at the time it was shockingly arbitrary who we put into episodes. We’d get faxes or Fedexs telling us about new characters for both Joe [Bacal, producer] and Transformers and telling us other ones had been discontinued. We wrote out the discontinued and added in the new ones. I mean, Optimus and Megatron were different, but a lot of the other characters’ involvement either depended on who marketing wanted to see or who we happened to like.”
Friedman, however, says that he argued against the idea of killing off Optimus Prime. During his time as an architectural student, Friedman took part in a program that helped determine what causes children to attach themselves to certain comic book characters. “A couple of days a week I would interact with kids presenting them with new games, characters, and traditional icons,” he recalls. “The department of psychology, with the school of business, would try to create a formula that assessed when kids became connected and what emotional triggers caused them to lock on. A lot of it was common sense because I had kids and saw how they responded. It was really useful because it validated what I saw myself when I was a kid connecting to various comic book, cartoon, and film characters. It gave me some insight into what I needed to do and was one of the reasons I didn’t want to kill Optimus Prime.”
Someone else who didn’t want to kill Optimus Prime was Nelson Shin, who had been approached with Friedman’s script to possibly direct. “We had a serious issue of whether to kill Optimus Prime and the Matrix transitioning onto Ironhide, which we could not decide for several weeks,” he recalls. “Optimus Prime was the leader of good guys. In the story board of mine, he should be killed, but when I asked if there would not be Optimus Prime toys any more after he was killed, no one answered it.” Although he would take on the job, the first set of meetings did not go well. “There were lots of sequences disagreed between the executive producer and me in storytelling, sequencing and scoring music,” he adds. “As a director – not as an investor – I kept insisting my points and it seemed we could not reach an agreement. I felt deeply disappointed, so I decided to take off for two weeks’ vacation on a cruise ship.”
For Friedman, the idea of killing off Optimus Prime was solely a commercial one. “To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove Daddy from the family, that wasn’t going to work,” he argues. “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.” He adds: “We had some steaming arguments that never got to Hasbro because they blocked it. They were Hasbro’s ad agency who graduated into producing their various works. It was a lucrative deal for them. It was one of those things where people do not understand what it is that is making them successful. They take for granted that the success is endlessly rewarding without acknowledging or understanding what the instruments of it actually are.”
When Shin returned from his vacation and took on the role of director, Dille returned to touch up Friedman’s script just as he had done on the cartoon series. “I know that Flint Dille changed several parts in the Ron Friedman’s script,” Shin notes. “They said the villains were too interesting in my first script,” Friedman adds. “I didn’t like that because I want villains to be interesting. It gives the Autobots something to take care of. The second script was substantially different.”
One of the major changes Dille made was to adjust Friedman’s darker tone, which had previously concerned the producers. In a scene early in the script, dated April 25th 1985, in which Megatron and his Armada invade an Autobot ship, several Transformers are disposed of viciously. “Prowl moves up beside his friends, firing back and Brawn is cut in half by Megatron’s blast,” the script reads. “Then Prowl turns as Scavenger melts him down, and turns and joins Megatron who is joined by Kickback, the three firing at once at Ironhide and Ratchet who, in the act of firing back, are fused together then blasted apart and fall in smoking, glowing fragments.” In a scene later on, Galvatron has corned Ultra Magnus to remove the Life Spark that Optimus Prime had given him (later re-dubbed The Matrix of Leadership) and, “As Ultra Magnus turns to Galvatron and hurls a bomb at him, Galvatron roars and transforms, letting Ultra Magnus have [it] full blast, point break. He is shattered, body parts melted and strewn about as his torso and head with one flailing arm attached sinks and falls in a sputter of dying sparks.” Several other elements – like Unicron being called Ingestor and the Life Spark becoming The Matrix of Leadership – were also changed in Dille’s re-writes. “The only rewrite I objected to was including the word ‘shit’,” Friedman notes. “I didn’t want to do that. I also insisted on bringing in a female Autobot and I insisted on having human beings interact with the Autobots. That was a battle. They were absolutely resistant to Arcee. I said I had a daughter who loves this stuff. There are other girls that like it. Put in a female Autobot.” The use of foul language, which was edited out of some home releases, wasn’t in Dille’s initial re-writes either. “As a director, I don’t want to put swearing in my film, but it was intentionally put after the movie almost completed,” Shin notes. “Generally the film would be received a G rating, but with the swearing, it would be given a PG. It would mobilise more audience by letting kids bring their parents as well, which was the idea of executive producers.”
