Ron Friedman

I killed all your childhood heroes.

Ron Friedman (born August 1, 1932) is an American television writer. Friedman wrote for live action shows such as Fantasy Island, Chico & the Man, Starsky and Hutch & The Odd Couple, while in animation, he scripted all four mini series for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, the first season of the Marvel Action Hour shows, Iron Man & Fantastic Four (in which he played the role of Blastarr), and the developer for Bionic 6.

When he won a talent search to write the G.I. Joe pilot, he was working as a play doctor and trying to properly break into Broadway. This would kick off his work in animation.^[1]

Role on The Transformers

Friedman was credited with "additional dialogue" on the first two seasons of the Generation 1 cartoon, his credit ranking just below story editors Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins. In practise, this job title meant that Friedman was something of a script editor, revising each and every script after it had been turned in by the original writer, adding, deleting, or altering dialogue as he saw fit. In particular, he was responsible for the vast majority of references to Cybertronic wildlife and alliterative metal body-parts ("You'll get scorch marks on my selenium shin-guards!" "Ready to feed Megatron a nickel knuckle sandwich!"), as well as the many quirky insults characters would throw at each other ("Watch it, you metallic mini-meatball, or I'll step on you!" "You and what army, you maxi-turkey?"). Additionally, in the second season, with so many episodes being simultaneously written by different writers who had no contact with one another, it was Friedman who was responsible for developing and maintaining the consistency of certain characters' speech patterns across the series; Powerglide's colorful boasting, for example, or Warpath's "Bang! Zoom! Pow!" utterances were the product of Friedman's pen.

One thing he says he did in a 2013 interview was to "take that limited information" from the Marvel-created character bios "and create characters somebody cared about", often figuring out how the voices may work. He also claimed if you look at those bios, "it’s not a character... Those descriptions mean nothing. It’s like reading the ingredients on a package of Twinkies".^[1] Some people would disagree.

Friedman produced two drafts for The Transformers: The Movie, both of which would have the basic structure of the film but with quite different characters and details. While most of the cast are different in his first draft, Arcee appeared from the start^[2] and he said he fought with Hasbro to include her as his daughter was a fan of similar cartoons. (Female Autobots appeared on the show first but the script was written after the first draft of the film) Despite so connected to killing Optimus Prime that he had an interview titled "He Killed Optimus Prime", he claims he told Hasbro that killing Prime was a bad idea; "to physically remove Daddy from the family, that wasn’t going to work."^[1]

The script he turned in was judged "incoherent" by writer/story editor Flint Dille and creative director Jay Bacal,^[3] who submitted their own script, "The Secret of Cybertron", but when it was turned down, Dille spearheaded the re-writing of Friedman's script into the version seen on-screen. Despite Dille's involvement, Friedman had negotiated to receive sole credit as writer, so Dille is only credited as "story consultant" for the film, but his name actually precedes Friedman's onscreen, signifying the extent of his involvement. A similar situation arose in the production of G.I. Joe: The Movie, which was predominantly penned by "story consultant" Buzz Dixon, but again, credited solely to Friedman.

References

External links

• Ron Friedman at the Internet Movie Database