40 Years of Transformers: Remembering Peter Cullen, Chester Bennington and the Hasbro childhood

On Transformers Day, a look back at how a few cool pieces of plastic gave children elaborate battles to stage, worlds to invent, heroes to admire and eventually a soundtrack to grow up with that taught a generation there was always more to it than meets the eye

Updated - September 17, 2026 11:30 am IST

The title card for ‘The Transformers: The Movie’ | Photo Credit: Fathom Entertainment

Today, September 17, is Transformers Day, and this year marks four decades since iconic The Transformers: The Movie opened in cinemas in 1986, an anniversary Hasbro and Fathom Entertainment are celebrating with a restored 4K theatrical re-release of the animated film (which will almost certainly elude Indian screens). The anniversary is also particularly melancholic this year. Peter Cullen, the actor whose magnificent, unmistakably paternal rumble made Optimus Prime one of the most recognisable figures in children’s entertainment, died only three weeks ago at 85.

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The franchise itself had already been around for two years by the time the movie released, having begun in 1984 when Hasbro brought its American Transformers line to market alongside the Marvel comic and animated series that gave shape to the Autobots, Decepticons and their war-torn homeworld of Cybertron. By the time my generation got hold of it though, all of that history was utterly immaterial. I was just a child standing in a toy store being presented with the proposition that a car was secretly a cool robot, and I saw no reason whatsoever to interrogate the premise. In fact, the less you interrogated it, the better it worked.

That was the great cosmic trick of “More Than Meets the Eye”. Transformers taught children like me that the world around us might actually be considerably more interesting than adults were letting on. A truck on the highway was still a truck, obviously, but there was now a non-zero chance that it was also a Cybertronian, and that faint possibility was enough to make every long car journey a little more memorable.

A still from ‘Transformers’ | Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures

For me, Transformers began with my grandmother. For most of my childhood, whenever she came visiting, she would take me to the local toy store and let me choose something. Looking at the collection I accumulated before turning ten, she must have visited approximately fifty times. In retrospect, this was an extraordinary arrangement for me and a fairly ruinous one for her wallet.

Transformers came to me perfectly positioned between my progression through toys. I had just graduated from a fairly serious Hot Wheels fixation and would eventually move on to Lego, so I was already primed for tiny machines and then for the pleasure of taking things apart and putting them together again. Transformers somehow fed both appetites in the same piece of plastic, then threw in the decisive fantasy that made the whole thing irresistible: the car was alive. It was a toy with a built-in identity crisis, and at that age, I considered this the coolest thing to ever exist.

The toys made that fantasy wonderfully tactile because every Transformer had its own little temperament to learn. You had to discover which panel moved first, which limb had to be tucked somewhere nonsensical, and how much force a particular hinge was willing to tolerate before it threatened dismemberment. Once I knew a figure well enough, my hands moved through its transformation on autopilot while my brain had already moved on to the battle I was about to stage.

The real Transformers cinematic universe actually existed long before Hollywood got involved, and it transpired across my bedroom floor and the living-room carpet, where just a handful of toys could generate lore dense with dynastic grudges and battle strategies with frankly, Sun Tzu-levels of seriousness. Every Transformer possessed years of invented history that I was obliged to honour for the sake of continuity. And when lunch finally interrupted a campaign, the battlefield stayed exactly where it was, with figures sprawled across the carpet and fallen soldiers waiting exactly where I had left them. That kind of play feels increasingly antique now. I have a hard time imagining this iPad-addicted, Fortnite-rotted, Cocomelon generation possessing the particular strain of imagination required to turn an afternoon with a few toys into something so elaborate and legendary. (Good lord, I’ve become the old man shaking his fist at the youth).