The Week Pop Culture Lost Dolly, Tim Curry, and Optimus Prime

Some weeks the obituary page starts to feel personal. This was one of them.

Dolly Parton died Tuesday. Tim Curry died the same day. Then, on Wednesday, Peter Cullen died. In barely 48 hours we lost Dolly, Dr. Frank-N-Furter and Optimus Prime — three names that have no business sharing a sentence, yet somehow describe an enormous piece of the pop culture many of us grew up with.

Dolly Parton was 80, and calling her a country singer always felt inadequate. She was certainly that — one of the great ones — but she was also a songwriter, actress, businesswoman, philanthropist and one of the rare celebrities who seemed to belong to everybody.

She wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.” She made movies including 9 to 5, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Steel Magnolias. In 1986 she became the name and public face of Dollywood, transforming an existing Tennessee theme park into something inseparable from her own story and from the region where she grew up. Her Imagination Library, begun in 1995, ultimately mailed more than 330 million books to children around the world.

The hair was enormous. The clothes sparkled. The self-deprecating jokes usually arrived before anyone else could make them. None of that ever obscured the talent underneath it. If anything, Dolly seemed to understand that there was no reason serious talent had to dress seriously.

There was something reassuring about knowing Dolly Parton was still out there. Now she isn't.

Tim Curry was also 80. “Reassuring” probably isn't the first word anyone would use for him.

Curry arrived in many of our lives wearing fishnets. His Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show became one of those performances that escaped the movie containing it. Even people who have never attended a midnight screening know the face, the costume and the attitude.

But Frank-N-Furter was only the beginning. Curry was the increasingly frantic Wadsworth in Clue, the nightmare fuel of Pennywise in the 1990 television adaptation of It, and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island. He could be sinister, ridiculous, elegant and completely over the top — sometimes all at once — and he understood that an outrageous role isn't always improved by restraint.

A 2012 stroke curtailed his physical acting, but it did not end his career; he continued to work, particularly in voice roles. More importantly for the audience, the old performances never went anywhere. Curry remained perpetually available to a new crop of Rocky Horror converts, Clue quoters and kids discovering that perhaps they shouldn't have watched It quite yet.

Then came Peter Cullen.

Cullen was 85, and millions of people who might not have recognized him on the street would have recognized him after three words: “Autobots, roll out.”

He first voiced Optimus Prime in the original Transformers cartoon in 1984. The remarkable thing isn't merely that the voice became famous. It's that, decades later, when Hollywood turned Transformers into a live-action film franchise, Cullen was still the voice coming out of Optimus Prime.

That voice had authority without bluster. Cullen credited his older brother Larry, a Marine veteran of Vietnam, with giving him the key before his audition. Larry's advice, as Cullen retold it over the years, was essentially this: don't play a Hollywood tough guy. Play a real hero — someone strong enough to be gentle.

Cullen did, and generations heard the difference.

The timing of his death carries an extra sting. This year is the 40th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie, the 1986 animated film that did something almost unthinkable to its young audience: it killed Optimus Prime.

The reaction wasn't just a legend that grew up around the movie. Hasbro executives later acknowledged receiving calls and letters from upset children, while members of the production recalled children crying in theaters. The people making a movie designed in part to move a toy line discovered that the kids watching it had formed a much deeper attachment to Optimus than anyone had anticipated.

And, because this was Transformers, they eventually brought him back. The television series first resurrected him briefly in “Dark Awakening,” then restored him for good in the two-part “The Return of Optimus Prime.” Peter Cullen came back with him.

He kept coming back.

That's the part that makes a week like this hurt in a peculiar way. Most of us never met Dolly Parton, Tim Curry or Peter Cullen. They didn't know us. But they were present anyway — in songs coming from a car radio, at a midnight movie with friends, behind a storm drain when we were too young to be watching It, or from a television set while an Optimus Prime toy sat on the carpet.

You don't notice people becoming part of your memory while it's happening. Then enough decades pass and somebody tells you they're gone.

One obituary is sad. Three in two days starts to feel as though somebody is dismantling the scenery.

Country music lost one of its defining voices. Cult cinema lost one of its great icons. And a generation lost the voice that taught it what a hero sounded like.

The cartoon accompanying this column puts Dolly Parton, Dr. Frank-N-Furter and Optimus Prime together at the Pearly Gates, with Saint Peter looking like a restaurant manager who has just watched a tour bus pull into the parking lot five minutes before closing.

It's a joke, of course. But the picture feels right. Dolly would probably apologize for the trouble. Frank-N-Furter would make an entrance. And somewhere behind them would come that unmistakable baritone.

Forty years ago, they killed Optimus Prime and made a generation of children cry. Then they brought him back.

This week, we lost Peter Cullen.

This time, there won't be another episode that fixes it.