Everyone who lived through it still remembers the annus horribilis that was 2016, when not the UK narrowly voted in favour of Brexit and Donald Trump was elected for the first time, but also when we experienced an uncommon wave of much beloved famous people dying, culminating in George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds dying in the space of four days over Christmas. At the time, I wrote a post about George Michael, Carrie Fisher and the many other deaths of 2016.
2026 is shaping up to be another annus horribilis with an uncommon wave of much beloved celebrities. Indeed, someone said on Discord “I thought 2016 was the rapture, but it seems we’re having another one.”
2026 already took Bonnie Tyler, Chuck Norris, James van der Beek, Anthony Stewart Head, Hayden Panettiere, Jon Cypher, James Tolkan, Sam Neill, Roger Sweet, Michael Halperin, Marcia Lucas, Gerry Conway, Sal Buscema, Dick Matena, Mario Adorf, Rita Süssmuth, Jürgen Habermas, Jesse Jackson, Michael Wright, Brenda Fricker, Catherine O’Hara, Marjane Satrapi, Tatjana Wood, Sam Kieth, Len Deighton, Valerie Perrine, John Crowley, Reggie Bannister, Ann Blyth, Daveigh Chase, Eric Dane, Robert Duvall, Michael Keating, Phyllida Law, Hal Williams, Wai Ching Ho, Kjell Nilsson, Victor Willis, Anne Schedeen, Michael Pennington, Patrick Muldoon, Sid Krofft, Mary Beth Hurt, Barry Caldwell, Robert Carradine, Bud Cort, David Hockney, Angelica Domröse, Alexander Held, Günther Maria Halmer, Georg Baselitz, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, Alexander Kluge, Cees Noteboom, Valentino, Jane Yolen, Rosemary Edghill, Ian Watson, Ted White, Erich von Däniken, James Sallis, Dafydd ab Hugh, R.S. Belcher and whoever I have forgotten.
And now, we got three punch of beloved celebrities dying that is very much like George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds all dying within four days over Christmas 2016.
Regular readers will know that I was in a car accident on Tuesday, August 25. When I finally made it home, I took a nap, because I really needed it, and literally woke up to the news that Dolly Parton had died aged 80.
My first and main exposure to Dolly Parton was as a singer. Country music was popular in West Germany in the 1970s and all the big country singers performed on Musikladen, even though Musikladen was actually a rock and pop program. However, they were open to all kinds of music and so lots of country musicians appeared on the show, including of course Dolly Parton. Her music was also played on the radio – and at least “Jolene” is still in regular rotation on the various oldie stations – and I very likely also saw her on The Muppets Show.
By the time, I was a teenager in the 1980s, country music was very much not cool anymore, at least not in Germany. I remember that my friend Dagmar told me that a boy she liked had told her his favourite singers were Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and someone else I forgot. Being a country fan as a teenager was very unusual at the time and I remember that Dagmar and I snarked that the boy primarily liked those singers because they had big tits – well, Dolly Parton and the one I forgot at least, since neither of us had any idea what Linda Ronstadt looked like. As an adult, I have a strong suspicion that Dagmar’s country-loving crush was actually gay.
Then there was my near-encounter with Dollywood. The year was 1988 and I was visiting relatives in Kentucky. They took me on a multi-day roadtrip further south. I remember that we spent the night in Knoxville, Tennessee, and then drove onwards across the Great Smoky Mountains. My aunt asked me, if I wanted to go to Dollywood or Gatlinburg, cause we could only visit one. I was confused, since I’d never heard of either of those places. “What’s Dollywood?” I asked. “It’s a theme park owned by Dolly Parton?” my aunt replied. “Dolly Parton? The country singer? Why does a country singer have a theme park?”
Anyway, I picked Gatlinburg, which was described to me as a beautiful mountain resort. It was very much not that. Instead, Gatlinburg was an agglomeration of the weirdest attractions imaginable – the sort of thing you only find in touristy towns in North America. Though I did have fun. My cousin and I visited Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and I wrote home to my friend Dagmar that I had just visited the weirdest town imaginable. Would Dollywood have been a better choice? I guess I’ll never know.
I knew that Dolly Parton also was an actress, but I haven’t seen a lot of her movies and TV shows. For example, I’m not sure if I ever actually saw what is probably her most famous acting role in Nine to Five, even though that movie was on German TV a lot in the late 1980s and early 1990s – under the far more appropriate title “Why don’t we just kill the boss?”, one of the rare examples of the German title being better than the original. I suspect Nine to Five suffered from my aversion to workplace and office comedies, which stems from a very bad West German office comedy called Büro, Büro (Office, Office). That said, I’m surprised that my Mom, who watched Büro, Büro and always told me that once I had a job, I would understand that show, which probably did more to make steadfastly avoid typical office jobs than anything, never watched Nine to Five.
The screen appearance of Dolly Parton I definitely saw, in the theater even, was Steel Magnolias. At the time in 1989 (though it probably was 1990 by the time the movie reached our shores), a dramedy about rural Southern women and their relationship problems with one of them tragically dying wasn’t at all the sort of thing I wanted to watch. It was very much “mother movie”, the sort of movie my Mom liked and would bawl her eyes out over, when someone died tragically. Interestingly enough, while I had faint memories of Steel Magnolias, I’d completely forgotten Dolly Parton was in it, until I chanced to run across the movie on TV a year ago or so. I mainly remembered that it was Julia Roberts’ breakout role.
Indeed, the screen appearance of Dolly Parton I found most memorable was her late career appearance in The Orville, where she plays a hologram of herself, offering advice and encouragement to a female leader of the Moclans, an alien species that suppresses women to the point that they make sure there are none by surgically altering female babies, after the female Moclan leader finds inspiration in Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five”. It’s a beautiful episode (and The Orville was a really good show that deserved more attention than it got) how something as seemingly silly and inconsequential as a country/pop song (though I would argue that “Nine to Five” is not silly at all, because those lyrics hit pretty hard) can inspire others to greatness. There’s even a fight scene set to “Nine to Five”.
It was only when I got on the internet that I learned that Dolly Parton’s was also a genuinely good person, a philanthropist, literacy advocate, supporter of science and someone who respected everybody regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. That’s also why her death was such a blow and what she will be remembered for, though if The Orville is anything to go by, her songs will live on and continue to inspire for a long time as well.
Barely a day later, the news dropped that Tim Curry had died, also aged 80. Unlike Dolly Parton, who seemed healthy and active until very recently, I knew that Tim Curry had been disabled since suffering a stroke back in 2012, so his death was less of a surprised. That said, it hit me hard.
My first exposure to Tim Curry was probably as Rooster Hannigan in Annie, which I remember seeing in the theater at age nine. I possibly even saw him in Clue and Legend, though I saw neither in the theater, but once they came to TV in the late 1980s/early 1990s. However, the first time I truly noticed Tim Curry was – as for so many people – in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was in the summer of either 1989 or 1990. A girl called Andrea, who knew my best friend Dagmar from the church choir (and is now her sister-in-law), wanted to go to an open air cinema performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and invited Dagmar and somehow I ended up tagging along, even though I was not overly keen on watching a movie called The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because with a title like that, how could that movie be anything other than terrible?
The open air cinema was on the grounds of the Weserstadion, though not in the big stadium, but on one of the smaller adjacent sports grounds. There were no costumes, at least not that I remember, but there were props and we were handed rice, a newspaper, toilet paper and cookie among other things, to be deployed at the appropriate times. This was clearly very, very weird.
The lights went off and the movie started with very big lips singing “Science Fiction Double Feature”. Now I hate looking at lips and mouths in close-up, I always have, so I closed my eyes. But damn, that song was amazing. Plus, the lyrics mentioned The Day the Earth Stood Still. And Flash Gordon. And Forbidden Planet. And When Worlds Collide. And It Came From Outer Space. And Tarantula. Plus, the actors who appeared in those movies.
Now at the time, I was in the middle of my teenage cineast phase, which mostly expressed itself as looking at and buying books about movies, preferably science fiction movies, though general movie books were good, too. I initially just looked at those books in the store and eventually bought them, because there were lots of pages about Star Wars and Star Trek. However, after reading the bits about Star Wars about a hundred times, I eventually read the rest of those books – most big coffee table books – as well and learned a lot about 1950s science fiction movies, though actually getting to see most of them was not easy in the three TV channel landscape of the 1980s. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that none of my movie books mentioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
What is more, no one in my school or my family knew any of those movies nor did they care. Not even Dagmar cared, when I tried to show my treasured movie books to her. Yet here was a movie with a terrible title that mentioned all of those movies that I thought no one except me had ever heard of.
Then the movie proper started and the music continued to be great. “Damn it, Janet”, “There’s a Light at the Frankenstein Place” – where we deployed the newspaper, the rice having already been deployed – and of course “The Time Warp”. And then finally Tim Curry entered as Frank ‘N Furter, singing “Sweet Transvestite”. Since I took Latin in school, I felt the need to inform Dagmar and Andrea, that transvestites and transsexuals had nothing to do with Transsylvania, but that “trans” was simply Latin for “cross”. Because obviously, a grammar lesson is what everybody wants in the middle of “Sweet Transvestite”.
Now I have heard from many, many people that The Rocky Horror Picture Show in general and “Sweet Transvestite” in particular were their first encounter with cross-dressing and gender fluidity and that such things were even possible. This was not the case for me and likely not for Dagmar and Andrea either. There was a popular drag queen program called Mary and Gordy on West German TV, NDR 3 occasionally broadcast shows from the Schmidt Theater in Hamburg, which included drag performances. So I knew that sometimes, men dress up as women and give some great performances. I also knew that trans women existed, because in the late 1970s and 1980s there was a popular singer who was rumoured to be trans. I’m not naming her, because she has come out, though I’m pretty sure she is. Oddly enough, I didn’t know trans men existed until I saw a documentary in the 1990s, though I always assumed that if there were trans women, there had to be trans men as well.
So Tim Curry strutting about in fishnets and corset wasn’t overly shocking to me, but I mentally filed it as “Oh, it’s like Mary and Gordy.” Instead, I was just enthralled by the absolutely magnetic performance Tim Curry gave. Then we got to “In just seven days, I can make you a man” with a Charles Atlas reference – something else I thought no one but me even knew about (I had only just started reading Marvel comics, which had Charles Atlas ads in every single issue) – and Peter Hinwood as Rocky, looking more like a real life He-Man than Dolph Lundgren. And of course, we shredded the toilet paper and threw it around Weserstadion in a glorious mess.
And then came the dinner scene. We ate our cookies and – once everybody on screen and in the audience realised just what or rather who was for dinner – Dagmar spat out her cookie all over the place. To this day, I cannot watch that scene without thinking of Dagmar spitting out the cookie.
By the time the movie came to its conclusion at a swimming pool underneath the RKO logo – another thing I assumed no one but me knew about – I was not only a fan, but I was convinced that this movie was speaking directly to me, since it knew about Charles Atlas and 1950s B-movies, and that had been made for me and not for Andrea or Dagmar or all of those other people, though they clearly seemed to enjoy it. And yes, there were people of both genders wearing fishnets and corsets and there was some of what I’d have called “weird sex stuff” at the time, but somehow this movie knew about and referenced all the things I was into and the music was amazing, too. By now I know that many, many people felt as if The Rocky Horror Picture Show was speaking directly to them. But as far as I know, I’m the only person who felt seen and understood because of the B-movie references.
From that moment on, I was a fan. I bought the soundtrack album and “The Time Warp” in particular was a staple at parties, which got me and my friends on the dancefloor. I remember a birthday party sometime in the early to mid 1990s, when my friends Britta, Annette, Ina and myself (I had a different friend group by then, since Dagmar and I had developed in different directions) were all doing the Time Warp and Annette jumped in the wrong direction, bumping into the rest of us. Somewhere in a pre-digital photo album, there’s a photo of us doing the Time Warp in a suburban living room.
It wasn’t just me and my friends either. Seemingly everybody of my generation loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The musical group at my high school integrated “Touch Me” into their performance Little Shop of Horror. And as for “Touch Me”, when Susan Sarandon became a serious actress in Oscar bait movies, I would always say, “Well, I liked her better in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when she ran around in her underwear and sang ‘Touch me, I wanna feel dirty’. Even if she wants to forget it, I know where she came from.”
Of course, I also tried to persuade my parents to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show with me, but somehow I could never get them to watch the film to very end. They inevitably bailed after fifteen minutes or so. I guess Tim Curry and his fishnet stockings were just a little too weird for them.
In the years that followed, I saw Tim Curry in many other roles. I watched him as Pennywise in It on TV and in Hunt for Red October and Home Alone 2, both of which I saw in the theater. I clearly remember seeing him in the 1993 Three Musketeers as Cardinal Richelieu with my friends Britta, Annette and Ina. “It’s Frank N Furter”, we whispered to each other. I must also have seen him in Loaded Weapon, also in 1993, though I have zero memory of that movie beyond the fact that I have seen it in the theater, because Britta wanted to watch it, cause she liked parody movies. Coincidentally, Loaded Weapon also features an early pre-stardom Samuel L. Jackson performance.
I very definitely saw Tim Curry in Muppet Treasure Island in the theater with the same friend group. Of course, we all considered ourselves too old for children’s films, but we were willing to make an exception for the Muppets.
And then there was The Shadow, a movie I love, since I love vintage pulp fiction, and which influenced a very early version of what would eventually become The Silencer, but which none of my friends wanted to see. Tim Curry played a Farley Claymore, assistant to Ian McKellen’s mad scientist Reinhardt Lane, who betrays him and allies himself with the villain Shiwan Khan. The Shadow is another case of a big budget movie that flopped and really deserved to do much better. So many of those.
Tim Curry also popped up on TV in show like Monk or Psych or in a memorable turn as a Night Stalker inspired serial killer in Criminal Minds. Tim Curry mostly played villains or at least somewhat shady characters, but whatever role he played, he was always memorable. And though I knew he wasn’t well and hadn’t been for more than ten years, losing him still hurts.
But it’s the third in this trifecta of celebrity deaths which hit me the hardest, harder than I expected.
Thursday was a busy day for me. I finished a bigger translation job and then went shopping at the Famila Einkaufsland mall in Oldenburg-Wechloy, which is fifty kilometers away. However, I needed something I could only find there – or at the Weserpark mall in Bremen, which is closer, but harder to get to due to the near permanent traffic jam on Autobahn A1. Because I wanted to finish my translation, I got started later than I wanted, then got held up by a traffic jam on Autobahn A28 and got home later than I’d planned. Then, just when I got home, I ran into two neighbours I needed to talk to, so it was pretty late by the time I got home and I was exhausted. What was more, it was the first day of LACon V, the 2026 Worldcon, and I had two virtual panels the evening.
So I decided to take a nap, though I slept uneasily, because I was worried about missing my panel. Then my alarm went off, I looked at my phone and saw that Peter Cullen had died, aged 85. And I started to cry spontaneously, even though I had to get up and get ready, because I had two Worldcon panels in an hour.
If you’re a child of the 1970s and 1980s, Peter Cullen’s voice was part of your childhood, whether you knew his name or not. I certainly recognised his name, because I would always watch the credits of the cartoons I loved and read and memorised the names of the people who made the magic happen, though I didn’t usually know which name provided the voice for which character, because the credits didn’t usually list individual roles.
The role that Peter Cullen will forever be identified with is of course, Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots in the Transformers franchise. There is no way that giant robots that transform into vehicles will ever not be cool, but Peter Cullen’s amazing performance as Optimus Prime is a large part of why Transformers are still beloved and remembered, when other 1980s cartoons and toylines are forgotten.
Peter Cullen has frequently recounted that his take on Optimus Prime, a character he initially found weird (and who can blame him, cause being asked to voice a heroic truck that’s also a robot is weird), was inspired by his brother Captain Larry Cullen of the US Marine Corps, who told him that if he was going to play a hero, he should be a real hero, strong enough to be gentle. And that’s very much what Optimus Prime is: strong but gentle, a leader, a parent figure, someone who commands respect and whom other follow, not because he is the strongest one in the room, but because he is gentle and caring and a good person, even though he is a robotic truck.
The cartoons of the 1980s are often accused of being nothing more than twenty-five-minute toy commercials and to a certain degree that’s true. And they were damn good commercials, so good that they keep selling toys and comics and movie tickets to adults forty years later. However, those cartoons sold us much more than just toys. They taught us how to be a good person and do the right thing. They taught us that a true leader isn’t the one who shouts the loudest, but the one who’s gentle and kind. They showed us what good parents and good relationships and good families looked like and that mother, father and biological kid isn’t the only kind of family out there (honestly, in retrospect it’s stunning how many obviously gay couples raising kids together can be found in 1980s cartoons). They taught us that everybody can be a hero, if you only do the right thing. They gave us strong women and men who weren’t afraid to cry and robotic trucks with more heart than many people had. They also gave us great role models and examples of positive masculinity, even though some of them were not human at all. And the reason is that the writers, directors, animators and voice actors took those “silly toy commercials” and weird characters seriously and gave it their all.
Over the past forty-two years, Optimus Prime uttered many a memorable line: “Freedom of the right of all sentient beings.” – “One shall stand, one shall fall” – “There is a thin line between being a hero and being a memory” – “We can’t stand by and watch the destruction of this beautiful planet.” – “Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing.” – “Do not forget what you have learned of our past. From its lessons, the future is forged.” Yes, Optimus Prime is a truck, but he’s also wise and a great role model.
In school, I remember that teachers repeatedly asked who our role models were. And the kids, at least the smart ones, always gave what were deemed respectable answers. Albert Schweizer and Mother Theresa were popular. Some kids said Mom and Dad, which was also deemed a respectable answer. Some kids named a sports star, actor or singer, which was not deemed respectable – though Dolly Parton would have been a much better answer than Mother Theresa. I usually tried to avoid answering and when I couldn’t avoid it, my answer usually was, “I don’t have any role models. I want to be myself, not someone else” and, when prompted, I would add, “Well, I don’t want to be like any one person, but I want to have certain skills like certain people.” Come to think of it, I should probably just have said Albert Schweizer or Mother Theresa or whoever won the Nobel Prize for Peace that year, but for some reason I didn’t want. Even though I obviously had people I admired. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Isaac Asimov would have been at the top of the list and personally, I don’t either is even remotely disrespectable. Okay, Asimov with all the groping, but I at least had no idea about that at the time.
However, my true role models – the ones I didn’t even dare to admit to myself, because it was just so embarassing and I was clearly stupid and uncultured – were far less respectable. They were the heroes and heroines of my favourite movies and TV shows. They were characters like Princess Leia Organa, Mr. Spock, Commander Cliff Alister McLane, Prince Adam/He-Man, Princess Adora/She-Ra, Duncan/Man-at-Arms and yes, Optimus Prime, too. Generation X is very much the neglected generation. The latchkey kids, the children of divorce, the children of mass unemployment, the children who were pretty sure they would eventually all be burned to crisp by a nuclear war anyway. These kids needed role models and good parent figures, because all too often, their own parents were inadequate. And those silly toy commercials on TV provided just that. That’s why these characters and the actors who brought them to life matter.
In many ways, this harkens back to Dolly Parton’s guest appearance in The Orville, showing that even seemingly silly and frivolous works of art can inspire people and have a much greater impact that anybody ever expected.
Along with Artax from The Neverending Story, the death of Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Movie is our generation’s Bambi’s Mom, a collective generational trauma (and we got to see Bambi’s Mom die, too). Transformers: The Movie is also a clear example of the cyniscism of the toy companies who viewed these shows as pure commercials and didn’t even realise that their kid audience was genuinely attached to those characters. Because the reason for the bloodbath that is Transformers: The Movie is that Hasbro wanted to retire the first wave of Transformer toys and introduce a new wave of toys with new characters. The reason Optimus Prime and all the others had to die is because Hasbro wanted to discontinue those toys and wanted us to buy Ultra Magnus and Rodimus Prime instead. Hasbro executives were supposedly genuinely stunned when they heard about kids sobbing in the theater, because to them Optimus Prime was an outdated toy, to be replaced by a newer, better model, and not a role model, father figure and friend.
Hasbro, of course, realised their mistake and brought Optimus Prime as well as many other beloved characters back. As for Transformers: The Movie, it is currently in theaters again for its fortieth anniversary as what Hasbro themselves have dubbed “The Apology Tour”. This time around, Transformers: The Movie is also playing in German theaters, whereas it never had a theatrical release in (West) Germany in the 1980s, because animated movies not by Disney had a very hard time getting into theaters here. I actually have a ticket for a special showing of Transformers: The Movie in September. And yes, I’m pretty sure I will cry, though I’m not normally one who cries at movies, at least not at the movies that are supposed to make you cry. For example, I didn’t cry when Julia Roberts’ character died in Steel Magnolias, though my Mom did. But I will cry at Transformers: The Movie, for Optimus Prime and for Peter Cullen, the man who brought him to life.
When I woke up from my nap on Thursday to the news that Peter Cullen had died and started crying, I said to myself, “How stupid! I’m crying for a truck.” But first of all, I was not crying for the truck, but for the man who had brought him to life and turned him into an amazing character. Peter Cullen was so identified with the role of Optimus Prime that Michael Bay brought him back for the live action Transformers movies, though there likely was pressure to get a celebrity voice. But even though the live action Transformers movies are highly variable, they got one thing right. Peter Cullen embodied Optimus Prime in a way no big name actor could ever be.
However, Peter Cullen was more than just Optimus Prime. He also voiced another Autobot, Ironhide. And he was Eeyore in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, which was likely my first exposure to his voice. He was Venger in the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, one of the great and genuinely scary cartoon villains of the 1980s. He voiced the Predator and King Kong and a Gremlin. He was K.A.R.R., K.I.T.T.’s evil older sibling in Knight Rider. He was Ramrod and Commander Eagle in Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs. He was the Red Skull in the 1980s Spider-Man cartoon. Most recently, he voiced Thaedus in Invincible.
When Chris Hemsworth voiced a younger Optimus Prime, then still known as Orion Pax, in the vastly underrated Transformers One in 2024, it became clear that we were headed for a passing of the torch or the matrix of leadership (even though Garry Chalk also voiced Optimus Prime in some of the many Transformers cartoons over the decades). And Chris Hemsworth did a great job and I wouldn’t mind at all, if he were the voice of Optimus Prime going forward. But losing Peter Cullen, the voice of so many heroes and villains of my childhood – and a depressed donkey, too – still hurts a lot.
Even though Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Peter Cullen were the most memorable deaths of the past days, the Grim Reaper kept busy and also took King Harald V of Norway at age 89. Meanwhile, Germany lost actor Andreas Hoppe, who is best known for his role as Inspector Mario Kopper in the long-running crime drama Tatort, aged 66. Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic also died aged 84, unlamented by anybody except possibly his family, and proved that sometimes, the Grim Reaper does get the right people, after all.
Considering that 2026 is only two thirds over, I shudder to think whom else this year may still claim.
sending...