Orson Welles recorded final role as planet-eating robot five days before death
Five days before he died, Orson Welles recorded his final performance — a planet-eating robot in a toy commercial. That role, as Unicron in the 1986 animated film The Transformers: The Movie, was his last. He was 70, in poor health, and his voice was so weak that engineers had to alter it with synthesizers until it barely sounded like him. He called it playing a toy.
Beginning September 17, the film returns to theaters in 4K for a five-day run through September 21 — a 40th-anniversary release organized by Hasbro and Fathom Entertainment, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Hasbro is framing it as an Apology Tour, a tongue-in-cheek campaign acknowledging that Optimus Prime's death in the film — and the letter-writing campaign from parents it provoked — left a generation of kids in tears.
The original release was a box office bomb. But the film has outlasted its initial failure through a voice cast that reads like a roster of 1980s prestige — Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, Frank Welker as Megatron, Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron, Judd Nelson as Hot Rod, Eric Idle as Wrek-Gar, and Robert Stack as Ultra Magnus, according to Action Figure Insider. And, at the center of it, Orson Welles.
"I can still remember him coming in and saying, 'I'm playing an entire planet,'" Flint Dille, a screenwriter on the film, recalled in an interview. Dille told her that Welles referred to the Transformers voice work as a job of work — ordinary labor, not a final statement.
The synthesized quality of Welles's Unicron voice is well documented. The Today.com account of his final role describes how his frailty during recording in October 1985 — he died of a heart attack that same month, before the film reached audiences — necessitated electronic treatment that obscured what remained of his famous baritone. The man who once read "War of the Worlds" over the radio, who had commanded rooms with his voice for four decades, left his last recorded words as a villain made of machinery and appetite.
Welles was not sentimental about it. Lear's account is that he described the work as playing a toy. There is no record of him expressing disappointment in the role or the film — which is its own kind of record, given that he had spent the latter part of his career being typecast in commercials and voice work he dismissed as mercenary. The Unicron sessions appear to have registered as neither triumph nor betrayal. They were work, completed five days before the end.
The 40th-anniversary re-release will screen in 4K, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter, though no additional restored footage or director's commentary has been announced. Hasbro and Fathom are selling the event as a cultural reckoning — the Apology Tour framing leans into the film's reputation as one of the first mainstream animated features to kill its hero in front of children. Whether the screenings will attract audiences beyond nostalgia, or serve as an extended marketing vehicle for Hasbro's current Transformers IP, will become clear starting September 17.
What is already clear is the oddness of the historical record: the last voice Orson Welles committed to tape was a planet-eating machine, recorded in October 1985 and released the following summer. He never saw the finished film.