Interview by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor for RadioFree.com
March 14, 2013

With the debut of the third season of The Hub's award-winning animated series Transformers Prime, fans are given a bit of a "good new, bad news" situation. On the upside, the drama and action are poised to be in overdrive, and the stakes are as high as ever: Megatron and his evil Decepticons have devastated the Autobots' home base and the surrounding city of Jasper, Nevada, and Optimus Prime and his team, already vastly outnumbered, have been split up and forced into hiding. To make matters even more dire, Optimus has been critically injured, and the villainous Shockwave has returned to supply Megatron with possibly his most lethal creation: Predaking, a monstrous beast that lives only to hunt and destroy Autobots. The introduction of this pivotal character has given the show an overarching theme and subtitle this year, similar to what was done in the sophomore seasons of Young Justice: Invasion and American Horror Story: Asylum.

The aforementioned downside to all of these engaging storylines is that Transformers Prime: Beast Hunters marks the conclusion of the series, and this third and final season will feature only 13 episodes, down from the 26 of its predecessors. Our silver lining amidst this sad development is that, in speaking with many of the creative individuals responsible for the show, the general consensus seems to be that this is not truly the end of the road, and that the possibility exists for another series set in this world and held to the same high standards.

Transformers Prime has arguably been the best incarnation of the decades-old "robots in diguise" franchise, with more opportunity for storytelling and characterization than the classic G1 series and the live action films, the latter of which have had to focus on visual spectacle targetted at a more general audience. But Prime delved into the mythology of the Transformers universe with some top-notch scripts, and, in an obviously brilliant move, reunited veteran voice actors Peter Cullen and Frank Welker in the respective roles of Optimus Prime and Megatron--roles that they originated, and roles that (fans will rightly point out) belong to them.

In this exclusive interview, executive producer Roberto Orci gave us hope for the future and assuaged our fears that the finale of Prime would herald the end of quality Transformers content. Orci, along with writing/producing partner Alex Kurtzman, has been actively involved with a slew of successful film and television properties in recent years--since penning the screenplay for 2007's Transformers, the duo's credits have included J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of Star Trek and TV's Fringe and Hawaii Five-0, and their roster of upcoming projects is steeped in sci-fi, fantasy, and action for both the big screen and small.

Win the newly released Transformers Prime Beast Hunters: Predacons Rising on Blu-ray/DVD!

RadioFree.com: I've been saying all day that I was disappointed when I learned Beast Hunters would be the final season of Transformers Prime. Please tell me that as long as you are involved in the Transformers universe, in whatever capacity that may be, you will do everything in your power to make it so that Peter Cullen and Frank Welker will not go away...

ROBERTO: [laughs] Oh, I can promise you, sir, that as long as I'm here, the voices that you know as Optimus Prime and Megatron will not go away! That was one of our biggest coups, was to get the two of them together again. I'm so proud of that. It's a great thing to be here and see them and hang out with them, and so you have my word: they're not going no place while I'm here!



At what point was it decided that Beast Hunters would be the theme of the third season?

Halfway through season two. You know, one of the things that I like about what we're doing is that we never rest on our laurels. We move through story faster than, I think, regular network shows might do. We do a lot of kinds of TV--we do this, we do Hawaii Five-0, we do Fringe--and it's easy to think, "Hey, let's save things for later!" And what I love about this show is we don't save things for later--we just burn through story. And that's the fun part. We're not saving anything for later. If you're a fan of this stuff, watch it, and you're going to get some story right away.

Despite the rapid rate at which Prime has been producing content, were there still elements you had to cut, given the condensed length of season three? Perhaps things you would have liked to explore if there had been a fourth season?

Yeah. And that's why we don't save anything. You're right. I don't ever know how much longer we might go, so all we can do--[producers] Jeff Kline, Duane Capizzi, our partners in this shenanigans--is not pretend that we know that we're going to be on forever, and make the story happen now. And that's the beauty of it: let's just tell the story and burn through it. And so if you're watching the show, you're not going to be sitting around waiting for things to happen--you're going to see things happen immediately. And we do that because we want to make sure that you see as much story as we have and not wait around to see what happens based on a schedule, or based on a network or whatever. We're just moving at our speed.

Is there the possibility of another spin-off from this universe, as was done with Transformers Rescue Bots?

Yes! I gotta tell you, I got, literally, talking points in the car on the way here in which The Hub is saying, "You can tease people about future shows, but don't talk too much about it. But know and tell people that we're talking about future things in the Transformers universe." And it could be great.

So as a fan, I will always have a fix going forward?

I think I got you covered! I think you're going to have a fix.

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