Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the full version of Brian Tyler’s Transformers Prime main title theme.

The third and fourth weeks of August 2026 were one of those periods when the Grim Reaper went on a rampage towards beloved celebrities or character actors who always steal scenes in things we love. (And then last night, I received news that Cassandra Wilson died on September 1. What the fuck, Grim Reaper?)

For fans of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Michael Wright, and Transformers Prime lead voice actor Peter Cullen, it was a rough two weeks, man. Wright—a veteran of the V franchise and the most magnetic actor in both The Five Heartbeats and the harrowing 1994 gangster flick Sugar Hill, where his most memorable scene was the one where his Fredo-ish character sang Teddy Pendergrass’s “Love T.K.O.” while repeatedly shooting a Mafioso in the leg—passed away first on August 19 and then was followed by Parton, Curry, and Cullen. None of them were TV stars, but their faces—or voices—were on TV a lot.

Parton and Curry even had one thing in common: They starred in ABC shows that were built around their colorful personalities, but those star vehicles ended up tanking. Parton had Dolly, a big-budget 1987-88 variety show that, these days, is beloved by Muppet fans for two standout episodes that paired Parton up with Miss Piggy. (She tried to kick Parton out of her own show in the only Dolly episode I watched when I was a kid.)

Meanwhile, Curry, who happened to chew the scenery opposite Piggy in the entertaining Muppet Treasure Island, starred as a washed-up soap actor on Over the Top, a 1997 sitcom that teamed him up with Annie Potts (and had nothing to do with arm wrestling).

Neither Parton nor Curry let the failure of their ABC star vehicles bring them down: Parton went on to be part of the ensemble in the 1989 hit movie version of Steel Magnolias (the bluegrass trilogy that rejuvenated her music career was about 10 years away), while Curry, prior to Over the Top, had already found a second calling as a voice actor.

Name any American animated series between 1991 (the year when Curry won a Daytime Emmy for voicing Captain Hook on Peter Pan & the Pirates) and 2013. Curry, who loved the process of voice acting, most likely had a recurring role or a guest spot on it.

Curry frequently voiced villains. But my favorite Curry role from an animated series was one where he played a mere nuisance to the heroes instead of one of the big bads: G. Gordon Godfrey, the confrontational, extraterrestrial-hating talk show host he voiced on Young Justice (“How many more lies are you hiding beneath our seas, and how much more propaganda will you ask the human race to swallow and wash down with a nice, cold RRRRRRReach?”).

Cullen, who passed away at 85, wasn’t as famous as Curry. But to folks like me who both grew up watching a lot of weekday afternoon cartoons about giant robots and admired the voice work of ’80s and ’90s movie trailer announcers, Cullen was legendary.

The heart of the Transformers franchise voiced the evil K.A.R.R. on Knight Rider, the titular hunter from planet Yautja Prime in the 1987 action classic Predator, Eeyore on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and more recently, Thaedus on Invincible. But the first place where I took notice of Cullen’s voice wasn’t Knight Rider. It was Voltron, World Events Productions’s American repackaging of both Beast King GoLion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV.

The Dairugger arc never caught on with Voltron viewers like the GoLion arc did—it was the Frank Sobotka season to the D’Angelo Barksdale season that was GoLion—while I didn’t give a shit. I thought that both the giant mecha from Dairugger and the giant mecha from GoLion looked cool.

Cullen narrated the opening titles for both arcs (and dubbed authority figure characters in both of them). “On planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed” are eight words that were as important to my childhood as “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.”

The 1984-85 season was the season that changed Cullen’s life. One week after Voltron began its run as a weekday afternoon staple, Hasbro-owned Claster Television, the distributor of G.I. Joe, introduced The Transformers—whose main overseas animation studio in its first three seasons happened to be Toei, the same studio behind GoLion and Dairugger—on Monday, September 17, 1984 to the same weekday afternoon viewers who checked out Voltron and started shouting “Form feet and legs!” at each other on the playground. And so began Cullen’s most popular role in animation and live action.

Fuck Bill Cosby and his 1984 creation of Cliff Huxtable, the OB-GYN who examines women in the basement of his brownstone, which isn’t creepy at all. Optimus Prime, not Cliff, is the TV dad from 1984 many of us ’80s kids continue to look up to or quote word-for-word as if his words of wisdom (“Just remember: There’s a thin line between being a hero and being a memory”) or enthusiastic commands to his team were every quotable insult about Drake from the first verse of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”

“I had a lot of people tell me stories like, ‘My father died when I was six, and Optimus Prime became my father,’ ” said the late Ron Friedman, the writer of The Transformers: The Movie’s screenplay, to interviewer Brian VanHooker in 2021.

And that was because of the benevolent gravitas of Cullen’s voice. He, in fact, modeled the voice of the leader of the Autobots after a loved one. But that loved one wasn’t his dad. The vocal inspiration for Optimus was Larry Cullen, his older brother and a Vietnam vet from the Marine Corps who said to Cullen right before his audition for The Transformers, “Peter, if you’re gonna be a hero, be a real hero. Don’t be a Hollywood hero type with all the BS and all the yelling and screaming and trying to be tough. Be strong enough to be gentle.”

The Transformers, known to the Transformers fandom as simply G1 (as in “Generation 1”), was never a critics’ darling like DuckTales and Batman: The Animated Series later were. Eighties parents or TV critics who covered children’s TV found plenty to complain about G1: It’s a 30-minute Hasbro toy commercial! Optimus’s pacifistic worldview is hypocritical because he regularly shoots at Decepticons! The animation sucks!

The critics were sometimes right. But they always overlooked one particular thing: G1 was full of entertaining voice work, thanks to the direction of the late Wally Burr.

I don’t think G1 has aged well. I haven’t watched a full G1 episode since the late ’80s, and ever since I found out that an anti-Arab storyline about the fictional country of “Carbombya” caused Casey Kasem, who was Lebanese American, to quit the show in disgust, it killed my interest in rewatching G1 on Tubi or any of Hasbro’s official YouTube accounts.

However, Cullen, Scatman Crothers, Michael Bell, Frank Welker, Chris Latta, Gregg Berger, and Alan Oppenheimer, who voiced Warpath (one of several Transformers characters my mom bought me when I was in third and fourth grade), were all fun to listen to during G1 and could never be accused of phoning it in as sentient robots from planet Cybertron. (Berger voiced Grimlock, my favorite character from G1, and he was my favorite mostly because he spoke in Cookie Monster-esque caveman English.)

A far better Transformers animated series was Transformers Prime, whose second season I temporarily reviewed for my Blogspot blog when it first aired on the Hub. It was simply a better written show, it had zero racism, and Polygon Pictures’s 3D animation—whether it was for the Autobot-vs.-Decepticon brawls or the gait of Bulkhead, a rotund “wrecker” for the Autobots, whenever he runs—still looks impressive. (Bulkhead’s gait sometimes makes me chuckle. He runs like Buzz Lightyear if he were high on coke.)

There was more diversity in both the writers’ room and the voice cast. Transformers Prime introduced me to the writing of Nicole Dubuc. She later wrote one of my favorite Young Justice episodes, “Image,” whose dead-on parody of cheesy sitcoms for teens was an opportunity for Dubuc, a former child actress, to poke fun at her own past as a cast member on Major Dad. And Sumalee Montano was so great on Transformers Prime as the voice of Arcee, a female Autobot who first appeared in The Transformers: The Movie, that whenever I saw her play one of Ben Cafferty’s Asian love interests on Veep—one of Veep’s running gags was Ben’s creepy Asian fetish—or Soji Asha’s fake mom on Star Trek: Picard, I said, “Arcee!”

Also, Transformers Prime was a much less shouty Transformers series. During G1, Welker and the late Latta screamed at the top of their lungs as, respectively, Megatron and Starscream (the Decepticon second-in-command whose main ambition is to overthrow Megatron), which would be fine if I watched the show every afternoon at 4 like I did when I was a kid. But if I binged G1 on Tubi, Welker and Latta’s nonstop shoutiness—as if they were trying to reach the rows in the back of some theater—would grow tiresome.

Susan Blu, who voiced Arcee for G1 and voice-directed Transformers Prime’s first 11 episodes, set a different tone for Transformers Prime: The Decepticons snarled (or, in the case of Knock Out, a Decepticon medic voiced by Daran Norris, purred) their lines instead of yelling them. That gave Megatron (voiced once again by Welker) and Starscream (voiced this time by Steve Blum from The Big O’s English dub) an intriguing “Vincent Price meets Tallulah Bankhead” vibe.

Though Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the screenwriters of Michael Bay’s first two live-action Transformers movies, helped develop Transformers Prime, the Hub’s original series, under showrunner Jeff Kline, wisely ditched everything from those movies that didn’t work (the misogyny, the racism, the mostly ugly Cybertronian character designs, a lowest-common-denominator sense of humor, too much time spent on the mostly grating human characters) and brought back the best performer from those movies who wasn’t Bernie Mac. That would be Cullen, whom Bayformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura didn’t want to come back to the role of Optimus. (Di Bonaventura wanted to get Liam Neeson, while Bay preferred Cullen.)

Cullen’s voice wasn’t Transformers Prime’s only link to the live-action movies. Transformers Prime emulated the live-action movies’ depiction of Bumblebee as an Autobot who lost his voice box and deprived its Bumblebee of his voice box as well.

Upon hearing the news of Cullen’s death, I didn’t want to go back to G1 or any of those damn Bay movies. I instead wanted to revisit Transformers Prime. But I realized I never watched “Darkness Rising,” its five-part series premiere, before, so I checked it out for the first time late last week on the Roku Channel.

Written by Dubuc, Duane Capizzi from Kids’ WB’s The Batman, the late Marsha Griffin, Steven Melching, and Joseph Kuhr, “Darkness Rising” ranks with director Travis Knight’s Bumblebee as an introduction to the Transformers characters that’s superior to the first Bayformers movie. (I still haven’t watched director Josh Cooley’s 3D-animated Transformers One.)

“We don’t need to write down to kids,” said Kline to then-TV Guide writer Michael Schneider in a 2011 TV Guide article about the writing on Transformers Prime. “We don’t need to simplify. They’ll follow you in stories. There were very few times in the room where we thought something was too mature.”

That explains why “Darkness Rising” works so well as an intro to Hasbro’s robots in disguise.

On the Hub, “Darkness Rising” first aired over the course of two weeks like an old Doctor Who arc that was being rerun on KTEH. And that’s what “Darkness Rising” feels like: a Jon Pertwee-era Who arc where the Doctor is split into three cranky Autobots (the always terrific Jeffrey Combs was much crankier in the role of Ratchet than Don Messick, a.k.a. Dr. Benton Quest, was when he voiced him for G1) and two much less cynical Autobots (one of whom is unable to speak), the companions are three kids from a sleepy Nevada town, and the Brigadier is Ernie Hudson with a beer belly.

If you have a kid you want to introduce to Transformers, keep that kid away from any of the Bayformers movies and direct the kid to Transformers Prime (or the much more lighthearted 3D-animated webseries Transformers: Cyberworld, where Kyle Kaczmarczyk is currently doing a fine job as the voice of Optimus because he’s not trying to do a Cullen impression). Kline’s series might even cause the kid to say, “I wish Optimus were my second dad”—like so many Transformers fans have done. Again, that was all because of the brilliance—or rather, the spark—of the late, great Cullen.