Transformers One Shares Similarities With Original Movie

Josh Cooley knew he needed to bring the heat with the voice talent.

By Aaron Perine

Transformers One director Josh Cooley talked about one surpising part of the original movie inspiring his latest take on the franchise. Entertainment Weekly sat down with the fimmaker to discuss Transformers One and the topic of Transformers: The Movie had to come up. Cooley told the outlet that the tremendous voice work on the 1986 feature weighed on his mind a bit. The older film is something of a geek media treasure. So many actors put their best foot forward in the Transformers movie. It's no wonder that the director felt motivated to get some A-list talent aboard to tell this origin story with Transformers One. Clearly, if first impressions are to be believed, that choice ended up proving a great one.

"There's some amazing voice work done on that movie," Cooley shared. "That was one thing I'm still blown away by — they got Orson Welles to voice a character in that film, for his last performance, too. So I knew that we needed to have some heavyweight cast in this film as well."

How Do You Make Transformers Without Peter Cullen?

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(Photo:

OPTIMUS PRIME has an iconic sound.

)

Even with Transformers One blazing a new trail for our favorite motorized heroes and villains, the question of replacing so many iconic performers were still daunting. You can't really talk about the Transformers series without mentioning Peter Cullen. Elsewhere in the same interview, director, Josh Cooley talked about approaching Orion Pax's voice knowing what we all know about the future of the franchise. It's probably best not to try and initiate the legend, instead take a look at what kind of weight this kind of legacy carries and go from there.

"The one thing that stressed me out from the minute I signed on was, Peter Cullen is Optimus Prime and is Transformers — that's what my Optimus Prime was growing up," he says. "I was concerned. How do we [follow that]? And when I really listened to Chris, he had this power to his voice. He took the lines and just pushed even further. He wasn't trying to imitate Peter Cullen, but he was doing the cadence and the rhythm of Optimus Prime, and I froze and I got goosebumps."

Related:

What Is The Story Of Transformers One?

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Transformers One's poster.

- Paramount)

Paramount has a fresh description for the movie: "TRANSFORMERS ONE is the untold origin story of OPTIMUS PRIME and MEGATRON, better known as sworn enemies, but once were friends bonded like brothers who changed the fate of Cybertron forever. In the first-ever fully CG-animated TRANSFORMERS movie, TRANSFORMERS ONE features a star-studded voice cast, including Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi with Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm."

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