You were learning right and wrong, you were learning about emotion and passion." "If you were a latch-key kid like I was," he explains, "these things actually became your surrogate mother and father. Klabunde's Transformers origin story is similar. I didn't have any other males in my life at the time." Optimus Prime kinda stood like my dad - he sounded like him. "My father, Edward, passing away was very traumatic to me. "I played with my Transformers till the paint came off," Prime recently told, a Transformers fan site. A majority of Savcon figures, it seems, ascribe a fundamentally transformative power to their robot heroes. It changed my life."īerger wasn't the only one. "I was kinda the new kid when that show was cast. "When I teach, which I do irregularly now, I tell students, 'Treat everything you do as though someone decades from now will remember it fondly,'" adds Berger, noting a host of Transformers appearances - many international - keep his schedule full all these years later. "I'm 34, and practically my whole life since then has been devoted to Transformers," he says, laughing. The next day at school we had to take standardized testing, and I was already doodling them." "I came inside from playing, and they showed this commercial for them," Springer recalls of one grade-school afternoon, "and I was just kind of mesmerized. I was like, 'OK, thank you, got me!'"įor Robert Springer of Jonesboro, a super fan who regularly contributes to a popular Transformers podcast and is a preregistered Savcon attendee, it was love at first sight. "I've always been a Godzilla fan - giant monsters, giant robots. "For me, when I saw (Grimlock), that was the moment. "I'm of the generation where I remember watching it as a kid back in the early '80s," says Washington, whose work for Savcon will be featured on the cover of this week's DO. Washington, an illustrator for Transformers and other robot-centric products who's so overjoyed by superpowerful automatons he practically shouts at you. "The Transformers following is mind-bending in its loyalty and its size worldwide," he says.Īmong those fans Berger helped bring into the fold is Frankie B. Yet it's Berger's work as Grimlock, a cocky Transformer who moonlights as a butt-kicking mecha T-Rex, that's earned him an extra-special place in the pantheon. Since then, he's voiced a Rolodex of classic characters including Garfield's best bud Odie and Eeyore in "Kingdom Hearts 2" and other Disney projects. "My association with Transformers goes all the way back to the original series," Berger explains. That was back in the early 1980s, when the bots took off with "The Transformers" animated series, which counted among its now-canonical voice actors Gregg Berger, one of Savcon's inaugural speakers. Optimus Prime the robot has been depicted as everything from a fire engine to a Lamborghini racer.īut his original tractor-trailer form is what hardcore Transformers fans seem to love most. "He's such a positive role model," Klabunde, 41, says of Optimus Prime - both his firefighter buddy and the chief Autobot who is his namesake. Now Prime is Savannah-bound to present that toy to Klabunde, the convention's founder, along with a signed certificate from the entire unit. "They actually flew the new (Transformers) toy up inside a Tigershark drone on a mission for me." "Since Sean Klabunde is doing all this hard work for Savcon, I got together with the drone unit at Forward Operating Base Spin Boldak," Prime explains. Prime's appearance at the convention will mark the conclusion of a key mission he recently initiated - flying a fire rescue drone in Savcon's honor over Afghan airspace. This weekend, he'll join a legion of other hugely devoted fans here for Savcon, a first-of-its-kind Transformers event at the Hilton Garden Inn Savannah/Midtown. "I wanted to do something outlandish for my birthday." "I changed my name to Optimus Prime when I was 30," explains the Ohio military firefighter - formerly Scott Edward Nall - who's served with the Navy and now the National Guard in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's felt a supernatural kinship with the giant alien robots since they came to Earth in 1984, but Optimus Prime waited for a special occasion to officially complete his transformation.
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