Tim Curry died on Wednesday, August 26, at his home in Toluca Lake. He was 80. His longtime manager and friend Marcia Hurwitz confirmed the death, and no cause was disclosed.

Most of the obituaries running today lead with Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Pennywise, Wadsworth in “Clue” and Long John Silver, and they are right to. This is a Transformers site, so it is worth marking the smaller thing: for one season, Tim Curry was a Transformers villain, and he was very good at it.

Doctor Thaddeus Morocco, Rescue Bots, 2012

Curry voiced Doctor Thaddeus Morocco, the recurring antagonist of Transformers: Rescue Bots. The character debuted in “The Other Doctor”, season 1 episode 12, which aired on May 19, 2012, written by Ken Pontac and Warren Graff and directed by Nathan Chew for Hasbro Studios and Atomic Cartoons. Morocco is a nineteenth-century scientist who kept himself alive with a cellular regeneration chamber, built a time machine, and spent most of his screen time trying to make the citizens of Griffin Rock obsolete.

Doctor Morocco in his first appearance, a tall thin man with slicked black hair, a waxed moustache and a purple monocle, wearing a grey Victorian suit with a red cravat and a jewelled brooch, one arm swept out in a showman's presenting gesture on a suburban lawn.

Morocco’s entrance in “The Other Doctor”, May 19 2012. Look at the pose. The character is introduced mid-flourish, presenting himself, and that is the note Curry plays for the whole run.

The design helps, but the design is doing about a third of the work. Morocco is drawn as a silent-film villain: monocle, waxed moustache, gloves, a brooch the size of a doorknob. Played straight that is a cliche a four-year-old has already seen. Curry plays him as a man who is enormously pleased to have thought of something, and who cannot wait for you to hear it.

Rescue Bots was the preschool show. It was aimed squarely at four-year-olds, it had no war, and it is the one corner of the franchise that adult fans routinely skip. Casting Curry in it was a strange and slightly wonderful decision, because he did not play down to it at all. Morocco arrives fully formed, purring, vain, delighted with himself, and the show is instantly better for having somebody in it who sounds like he might actually win.

The fandom noticed the other joke immediately. The Transformers Wiki still captions its Morocco gallery “Let’s do the Time Warp again”, which is what happens when you hire the man from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to play a Victorian scientist with a time machine.

What ended it

Curry suffered a paralysing stroke later in 2012, the year Morocco debuted. He used a wheelchair from then on, and he did not return to the role. The Transformers Wiki credits him with season 1 only; Jonny Rees voiced Morocco from season 2 onward, through the rest of the series.

Which means his last work as the character is the season 1 finale, episodes 25 and 26, “It’s a Bot Time” and “Bot to the Future”. Morocco gets a time machine, an army of MorBots and a dark alternate Griffin Rock to gloat over, and then Curry is gone from the part.

Doctor Morocco shouting an order with his arm outstretched and finger pointing, monocle glinting, standing in front of two large grey and purple MorBot robots under a dark sky.

Morocco commanding his MorBots in “Bot to the Future”, the season 1 finale and the last episode Curry voiced him in. He is at full volume and having the time of his life.

That is the whole of Curry’s Transformers work, a single season of a single character, and we are not going to inflate it into more than it was. It does not need inflating: a franchise this size has had exactly one performer who was already a genuine screen legend when he walked into the booth to play a cartoon villain for children, and this was him.

There is a small physical trace of it too. Hasbro made a Morocco figure, a non-articulated PVC packaged with Blades the Copter-Bot, revealed at Toy Fair 2013 and trickling into stores late that year, and later repackaged inside the 2015 Shark Sub Capture playset.

Hasbro's Rescue Bots two-pack on a white background: Blades the Copter-Bot in white, orange and grey with a blue hook accessory, beside a small non-articulated Doctor Morocco figure in a tan suit with black boots and gloves.

The Blades and Dr. Morocco two-pack, 2013. The monocle survived the trip to plastic, which at that scale is more than you would expect.

It is a stubby little thing sold at pocket-money prices, and it is also, as far as we can tell, the only Tim Curry action figure Hasbro ever produced for this line.

Elsewhere

Curry originated Frank-N-Furter on the London stage in 1973, played the role in Los Angeles in 1974 and on Broadway in 1975, and then in the 1975 film. He published a memoir, “Vagabond”, in 2025. His last widely seen public appearances were at Rocky Horror anniversary events, including the 50th anniversary Q and A in Los Angeles in September 2025 where the photograph at the top of this page was taken.

If you want the fuller picture of who the people behind these cartoons actually were, our guide to the voice cast of the 1984 series is the place to start, and we recently covered Bob Budiansky heading to TFcon Orlando, which is the happier version of the same beat.

Sources