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G.I. JOE: ARMY

News · 2026-08-27

Peter Cullen has died at 85, and he was in G.I. Joe too

By gijoe.army news desk

Peter Cullen has died at 85, and he was in G.I. Joe too

Peter Cullen died on Wednesday, August 26, at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85. Every headline today says Optimus Prime, and every headline today is correct.

This is a G.I. Joe site, so here is the part the Transformers obituaries will not spend a paragraph on. Sunbow made both shows out of the same building with the same casting pool, and Cullen worked the Joe side too.

Airborne, Ramar and Zandar

Cullen is credited on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero across 1985 and 1986 as Airborne, as Ramar, and as Zandar.

Filecard artwork of Zandar: a Dreadnok with orange hair and a blue headband, a red stripe painted across his face, a pink neck scarf, a bare torso marked with red lightning bolts, white trousers and yellow knee pads, holding a speargun with a quiver of spears on his back. A second study of his head sits beside the figure.

Zandar. Younger brother of Zartan, fraternal twin of Zarana, introduced with the second wave of Dreadnok figures in 1986.

Zandar is the interesting one, because it is the opposite job to the one Cullen is famous for. Optimus Prime is the voice of a man who has nothing to prove. Zandar is a master of camouflage and silent weapons whose own gang is scared of him for reasons the show never explains, a Dreadnok who is quiet in a cast that is not.

He first shows up in the animated series in season two, and there is a detail here that fans of the show tend to enjoy. Cullen was not available for two of the five parts of “Arise, Serpentor, Arise!”, so Roger C. Carmel covered Zandar in part two and Milton James covered him in part five. Three actors, one Dreadnok, one five part story. That is 1986 syndicated television for you.

Two credits in one 1987 film

Cullen turns up twice in the credits of G.I. Joe: The Movie, released in 1987. He is listed for Zandar again, for an unnamed scientist, and for Nemesis Enforcer.

The G.I. Joe: The Movie poster: Duke, Sgt. Slaughter, Lady Jaye and other Joes bursting forward against a starburst of red, white and blue, with Cobra-La creatures and a serpent along the bottom edge.

G.I. Joe: The Movie, 1987. Cullen is in these credits three times.

Nemesis Enforcer is the winged bodyguard of Cobra-La, and he is not in the film to make speeches. Whatever that credit covers, it is a lot closer to snarling than to dialogue.

Which is worth sitting with for a second, because that same year Cullen supplied the vocalisations for the title creature in Predator. The clicking. In 1987 the man who had spent two years being the most reassuring voice on children’s television was also the thing in the trees and the thing behind Golobulus’s throne.

While we are here: he was not Zartan

Cullen gets credited for Zartan on a lot of fan pages, and he should not be. Zartan in the Sunbow series was Zack Hoffman, who has said in interviews that he built the voice as a mix of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex from A Clockwork Orange and James Bond. Cullen had the younger brother. Hoffman had the master of disguise.

We are noting it in an obituary rather than letting it slide because Cullen spent his career being meticulous about credit, and because Hoffman’s Zartan is one of the best performances in that show and deserves to keep it.

Peter Cullen in 2015, smiling in a light blue shirt in front of a convention backdrop.

Cullen at a convention in 2015. He did the signing circuit for decades.

The line his family asked people to remember

Cullen built Optimus Prime out of advice from his older brother Larry, a retired captain in the United States Marine Corps who served in Vietnam. Larry told him not to play a Hollywood hero, on the grounds that real ones are “tough enough to be gentle”.

His family’s statement this week asked that people “honor his remarkable legacy by serving your communities and leading others with compassion, integrity, and loyalty, and always remember, ‘be strong enough to be gentle.’”

On a site about a cartoon that opened every episode with a squad of specialists and closed it with somebody explaining how not to get hurt, that is not a bad note to go out on.

Our sister site has the full account of his Transformers career: Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime, has died at 85.

Sources

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