Ron Friedman, who wrote for The Jonathan Winters Show, Chico and the Man, Starsky & Hutch and Fantasy Island, rejuvenated G.I. Joe and killed off — against his will — the beloved Optimus Prime in the first Transformers movie, has died. He was 93.
Friedman died Sept. 16 of complications from a lower gastrointestinal infection, his wife, Valerie Friedman, announced.
During a career that spanned more than 700 hours of television, the onetime architect also worked on Get Smart, The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, The Odd Couple, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family, Barney Miller, Happy Days, All in the Family, Wonder Woman, Sledge Hammer!, The Fall Guy and The New WKRP in Cincinnati.
He credited Danny Kaye with giving him his big break in Hollywood after the showbiz legend had read material that he had written for John F. Kennedy comic impersonator Vaughn Meader in the aftermath of the president’s 1963 assassination.
After starting out on comedies and then shifting to network dramas, Friedman had a third act as an animation writer when Hasbro enlisted him to bring G.I. Joe back to life. The action figure had fallen out of favor with the public, who had soured on the military in the Vietnam War era.
“In those years, animation was considered the boneyard for writers. Writers who wrote for TV animation were considered dummies or incompetents,” Friedman told THR in 2016. “Hasbro sent me the shrink-packed action figures, but there was no story yet. I decided to create these groups of families. I created the bad family, who was [the terrorist organization] COBRA, to whom I gave the battle cry, ‘Co-bra!’ and the good family, to whom I gave the battle cry, ‘Yo, Joe!’”
Friedman said he beat out more than 100 other writers who had pitched for the job to develop the five-part 1983 cartoon miniseries G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. He also worked on another G.I. Joe miniseries, a syndicated series and 1987’s G.I. Joe: The Movie.
Meanwhile, Friedman had co-written for Hasbro the screenplay for the animated The Transformers: The Movie (1986), which featured a voice cast that included Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and, as the heroic Autobot Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen.
Friedman said he didn’t think it was wise to kill Optimus — he ends up perishing in a duel with the tyrannical Megatron — but Hasbro execs wouldn’t have it any other way. There were reports of heartbroken children leaving theaters in tears, and the film underperformed at the box office, earning just $5.8 million domestically.
“To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove ‘Daddy’ from the family, that wasn’t going to work,” Friedman said in 2013. “Hasbro didn’t know how to evaluate it. They didn’t recognize that Optimus Prime was the heartbeat of the Autobots. You cannot pass that over and have any hope of duplicating the success you had. Once you establish an icon, you’re a fool if you don’t try to preserve it.”
Optimus would return in a 1987 straight-to-video movie, and in 2019, Friedman published the book I Killed Optimus Prime (So Sue Me).
‘I Killed Optimus Prime’
The older of two sons, Ronald Irwin Friedman (named for screen star Ronald Colman) was born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 1, 1932. His father, Louie, owned a men’s clothing store and spoke about a dozen languages. His mother, Mina, was a concert pianist and opera singer who became a piano teacher after her husband died in 1943.
Raised in Weirton, West Virginia, Friedman recalled encountering antisemitism as a kid. “We went to the store to get our comic books, and there was a sign — ‘No Jews or Dogs,’” he said in 2016 of a formative incident when he and his younger brother, Al, were banned by the new owner of their favorite shop.
Friedman graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1955 with a bachelor of arts degree in architecture, then designed buildings for about seven years — he even collaborated with Frank Lloyd Wright — before trying his hand at comedy. He accepted an invitation from comic Shelley Berman to come to New York in 1960, and Goodman Ace, a writer on The Perry Como Show, helped him land an agent at William Morris.
Friedman wrote jokes for comics around New York and was hired by Meader, who had voiced JFK on the wildly successful 1962 comedy album The First Family but realized his livelihood was in jeopardy with the man he impersonated now dead.
Friedman came up with a new act for Meader, who performed it for the first time at the Blue Angel nightclub before a very curious audience. “Every magazine, every newspaper, every television outlet was there, the place was jammed to see what he would do,” he said in a 2017 Television Academy Foundation/Writers Guild Foundation interview. “The act went over very well, but all of the reviews summarized the same thing: Vaughn Meader is an indifferent performer, but the material is brilliant.”
Kaye saw his stuff and brought him to Los Angeles, where he wrote for Kaye’s CBS variety show from 1964-66 and shared an Emmy nomination in ’66 with Paul Mazursky, Larry Tucker and Pat McCormick, his frequent writing partner.
Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Friedman rubbed shoulders with many a legend, including Lucille Ball, for whom he and McCormick wrote the 1966 CBS primetime special Lucy in London. The colorful Friedman was fond of telling stories from these encounters, like this one on Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast in 2018.
According to Ball, she and Desi Arnaz had hired Welles to deliver a script in exchange for the couple paying off his $100,000 tab at the Chateau Marmont. They put him up in their home in Palm Springs, but weeks went by with no script materializing. Meanwhile, Welles was ringing up expenses.
An irate Arnaz drove to Palm Springs in the middle of the night with a gun, and as he told the story, “I put the gun in his nose. I said, ‘You fat fuck. You are going to bring us something we can shoot in three weeks, or I’m going to kill you.’” A script appeared 10 days later. The result was The Fountain of Youth, a TV pilot that won a Peabody Award.
In the ’70s, Friedman served as a “troubleshooter” on several Norman Lear shows and wrote one episode of CBS’ All in the Family, the hilarious 1974 installment “Archie’s Contract,” where a scam artist gets Carroll O’Connor’s character to buy aluminum siding for his brick home.
Friedman said that while working on the 1974-78 NBC sitcom Chico and the Man, he tried to convince Freddie Prinze to give up cocaine. When that didn’t work, he brought the star’s drug problem to the attention of network execs.
“They said, ‘That’s not my concern, it’s well in hand, drugs are a fact of life, there’s no morality clause we’re invoking, he knows his lines,’” he recalled. Prinze died by suicide with a gunshot to the head in January 1977.
In his transition from sitcoms, Friedman landed in the orbit of Aaron Spelling after writing a 1976 episode of the crime drama Starsky & Hutch. The prolific producer kept him busy, with dozens of assignments on Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Vega$ and 19 TV pilots.
“Episodic television is all about writing a part for that guest [star],” he recalled Spelling telling him. “They are what keeps the show [alive].”
Friedman noted that for decades, irate Transformers fans “have been stopping me and saying, ‘You fucker, you killed Optimus Prime. I was a little kid and I cried my eyes out and my mommy wouldn’t let me see it,’ or ‘Why did you kill him? You’re a prick,’” he noted. “But Hasbro insisted. They wanted to create a new character with a new home base and tools and weapons.”
Friedman worked on other animated shows featuring the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Bionic Six and, with good friend Stan Lee, The Marvel Action Hour.
For more than three decades, he lectured and taught screenwriting at USC and Chapman University.
“I wanted to teach the ability to overcome impossible situations without losing hope,” Friedman told THR. “The bleaker things are, the more it is essential that you do not forget what your mission is and do not lose hope that good will triumph.”
He and his wife married in 1973 and had three children, Ian, Liza and Ashley.