“Hey Frank, I’m getting whacked on page 17,” Mr. Cullen recalled telling Mr. Welker, according to an account in The Mississauga News. “I’m not coming back. There go the car payments.”
(After a backlash, Optimus Prime was revived in the third season of the cartoon series.)
Mr. Cullen’s other notable role came when he was cast in 1988 as the voice of Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh’s grumpy friend, in “The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” an animated series on ABC. He went on to reprise the role in films, other animated series and straight-to-video releases.
“I enjoyed doing Eeyore because he was simply charming,” Mr. Cullen told NPR in 2014. “And I get an awful lot of reactions from, especially, young kids when I go up and just say” — he slipped into Eeyore’s voice — “‘Hello. Thanks for noticing me.’ And to see their faces light up, that to me is one of the great joys.”
Peter Claver Cullen was born on July 28, 1941, in Montreal to American parents, Muriel McCann, a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, and Henry Laurence Cullen, an executive with the International Paper Sales Company.
Peter was exposed to radio at an early age; his maternal grandfather, Alfred Watterson McCann, was a muckraking radio journalist on WOR in New York City. After Mr. McCann died in 1931, Peter’s aunt and uncle, Alfred W. McCann Jr. and Dora McCann, took over his show and would put their nephew on the air when he visited from Canada.
“They would say, ‘And now, my young nephew from Montreal is in the room, and come over here, Peter, go and say hello to the people,’” Mr. Cullen recalled at GalaxyCon Columbus in 2023.
