The September 1 announcement led on the runtime, the cast and Bobby Krlic’s score. The clip Hasbro put out nine days later leads on Soundwave putting Optimus Prime on the ground.

The official Transformers channel posted Optimus Prime: Awakening EXCLUSIVE CLIP on the morning of September 10, and by the time we sat down with it the counter had passed 724,000 views. It runs thirty-five seconds and it is the first footage Hasbro has released from the short. It closes on a Fathom card: GET TICKETS AT FATHOMENTERTAINMENT.COM, IN THEATRES SEPTEMBER 17, with a PG badge and the 40 YEARS anniversary mark beside it. The channel’s description repeats what was already known, the twelve minute runtime, Frank Welker as Megatron and Soundwave, the late Peter Cullen in his final performance as Optimus Prime, and then it turns to his death: “In light of Peter’s passing, we are especially honored to share this performance with the Transformers community and celebrate the extraordinary legacy he leaves behind.”

Everything after the title card is night, and the ground is grey.

Optimus is in truck mode, headlights up, crossing broken rock under a sky with stars in it. Something very large stands up on the ridge above him. It is Soundwave, and he is built to the G1 animation model rather than to any toy: shoulder cannon, red visor, the cassette door across the chest, the Decepticon badge on the waist panel where the animation carried it. Something small launches out of him and corkscrews off across the valley on a white trail. Then the magenta starts, and Prime takes the first hit while he is still a truck.

He transforms mid-fall with his arms out against the blast. The shot after that is the transformation finishing: the cab tips forward, the head rises out of it, one optic coming up blue in the dark. Then he is standing, full G1 model, Autobot badge on the shoulder, and the camera is down in the rocks looking up at him.

The description sells the clip on Cullen’s last performance. The clip itself spends its final seconds on Bumblebee, and on a Decepticon badge lit up beside him. Prime speaks twice, and nobody else speaks at all [1]:

No matter how many times you fall, you just keep getting back up.

Bumblebee! We need to get to safety.

A yellow shape drops into frame, there is a tangle of red and yellow and a spray of sparks, and the final shot tilts up a yellow chest with black stripes to a head with red optics and a bared silver mouth under them. A lit Decepticon insignia fills the panel beside it. Low on the body there is a pale blue window, in the place a G1 Bumblebee carries his Volkswagen glass. Hasbro has named nobody, and nothing in the clip says outright that this is Bumblebee rather than something wearing his parts, but Prime says the name seconds earlier and the model is his [2].

Soundwave standing on a rock ridge at night in the Optimus Prime Awakening teaser clip, blue with a red visor, shoulder cannon raised, the cassette door across his chest and a purple Decepticon badge on the waist panel

Soundwave, built to the G1 animation model. Frame from the official clip, Hasbro.

What it does to the story we ran this morning

Our piece on the early screening opened by saying no audio from the short had been released. That stopped being true later the same day, and the post has been corrected.

What the attendees told Reddit about Krlic’s score still stands, and the clip settles none of it either way. There is music under the ambush, but no cue runs long enough to tell you what he is doing across twelve minutes. The description of the animation does get a check against it, though. TFW2005’s report out of that screening said the short is 3D and looked like 2D, and that holds up here; the models are dimensional and they move in depth, while the outlines, the flat colour blocking and the cel-style shadow edges are all doing an impression of the 1986 film.

Everything else holds. The September 1 announcement gave the runtime, the cast and Krlic’s credit, and none of it has moved.

The final shot of the Optimus Prime Awakening teaser clip, a yellow and black robot head with glowing red optics and a bared silver mouth, lit beside a dark panel displaying a purple Decepticon insignia

The last shot in the clip. Frame from the official clip, Hasbro.

Seven days

The film returns to cinemas on September 17 and the short plays with it. Our tickets page carries the caveats about which dates your own cinema is actually listing, because Fathom’s release page and Hasbro’s July announcement give different end dates for the run. Cullen died on August 27, three weeks before the last thing he recorded as Prime reaches a cinema screen. Thirty-five seconds of it are in public now, and the rest arrives in a week!

threezero’s MDLX Bumblebee, in the 1986 movie design, is open for pre-order at BigBadToyStore at $71.99, out of the same 40th anniversary line as the Optimus we linked to on September 1.

Sources

[1] Both lines were transcribed off the clip’s own audio, because the video carries no caption track, and the timings in this piece were read off the same file. They are quoted as we heard them. A third line sits under the opening title card and is too low in the mix to quote, so it is not quoted here.

[2] The obvious reading is a corrupted or reformatted Bumblebee. The obvious counter-reading is that the badge belongs to whatever is holding that screen rather than to him. Ask us again on the seventeenth.