Frank Welker has kept a website for years, and until this weekend it opened the way an actor’s website is supposed to open, with his name across the top and a paragraph underneath listing George the monkey, Fred Jones, Scooby-Doo, Ralph the studio guard in Animaniacs, Garfield and Megatron. Go to frankwelker.com now and none of that is on the screen. You get Peter Cullen.

The old homepage has not been taken down and nothing on it has changed; it has been moved to frankwelker.com/home-1, where the browser tab still reads “Home | Frank Welker” and the Curious George paragraph is untouched. But the tab on the address that people actually type now reads “Peter’s Page”. That page has been added to the navigation bar as well, after Media Gallery, Filmology, About Frank, Fan Art, Let Me Be Frank and Where’s Frank?, and the link under the new item points at the root of the site rather than at a subpage. TFW2005 picked the tribute up on Monday morning and called it an update to Welker’s website [1], which is accurate as far as it goes. But Welker gave Peter Cullen his front door.

The writing is not a statement

There was a Welker statement about Cullen last week, issued through Hasbro alongside the announcement of Optimus Prime: Awakening, and you can hear the publicist in it. This is not that. It opens with a list that has no Transformers in it at all.

With profound sadness and deep respect… Peter Cullen. An actor, a boxer, a polo player, a cowboy, a disc jockey, a writer, a singer, an announcer, a husband, a father, a grandfather, an icon and a friend.

A paragraph later he gets to the part most tributes leave out.

For those of us who were lucky enough to know Peter and travel through time with him, we knew he was special. Yes, we also knew he could be stubborn, ornery and Irish. But like all “interesting” human beings he was wonderfully complicated.

Peter Cullen photographed seated in a dark blazer over a purple and white checked shirt and jeans, wearing gold aviator sunglasses, cut out against a white background

Then comes a stretch about clothes, shops, hotels and restaurants, and Welker uses it to say that Cullen was the more sophisticated of the two of them and was always quick to forgive his own “rather backward ways”. The next paragraph puts the rivalry and the friendship into a single sentence.

When you think of our characters Optimus Prime and Megatron we were arch enemies and spent our entire time trying to destroy one another…but in real life we spent our entire time trying to destroy each other with laughter.

He finishes with the nicknames. Welker called him “Petro”, Cullen called Welker “Megs” and “kid”, and Welker says he especially liked being called kid. He turned 80 in March.

The graphic carries a second dedication

Near the top of the page sits an image Welker appears to have assembled himself, and the words on it are not in the plain-text version that TFW2005 reprinted. It uses the live-action Prime and Megatron heads facing each other across a city skyline. The lines laid over the sky read “Optimus Prime …an arch enemy, a hero, a legend, a friend! …you stand alone above all others. Megatron.”

A graphic from Frank Welker's website showing the live action Optimus Prime and Megatron facing each other over a city skyline, captioned Optimus Prime, an arch enemy, a hero, a legend, a friend, you stand alone above all others, signed Megatron

Signing a memorial as Megatron is the sort of thing you can only do to somebody you have been pretending to kill since 1984, a few lines above the paragraph about destroying each other with laughter.

Mostly it is a photo album

Ten images sit on the page and seven of them have both men in the frame. There is a red carpet in dark suits, a panel table, a convention backdrop where a much younger Welker has his arm around a much younger Cullen, a Steel City Con photo in which Cullen is pulling a face for the camera, and the rooftop shot at the top of this story. Two more are Cullen on his own, including the seated portrait above. None of them is dated and none of them is captioned, but one of them does not need a caption.

Frank Welker and Peter Cullen pointing at each other at a RogueToys ToyCon, standing in front of life size Megatron and Optimus Prime statues

The best of them is a RogueToys ToyCon appearance with life-size Optimus Prime and Megatron statues built behind the backdrop, and the two of them have arranged themselves so that each is standing in front of his own character, pointing at the other one. Cullen died on August 26 at 85. The companies that sold the toys have put out their statements since, and the two things that have added anything came from people who worked the same booths he did: Dan Gilvezan put a nine year old interview online for nothing, and now this [2].

The page carries no date, no press contact and no explanation of why it is where it is, so we cannot tell you when Welker made the change, only that it was there on Monday morning. Nobody asked him to do it.

[1] TFW2005, Monday September 7 at 10:25 am, filed under Other News by Black Convoy and credited to forum member Chopperface. The site reproduced the prose in full underneath its own post, and that reprint is where most people will have read it. The graphic and the photographs are only on Welker’s page.

[2] Both are worth reading in full and neither of them costs anything. Gilvezan’s is a nine page PDF on his own site; Welker’s is a single scrolling page.

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