I've kind of just taken it as a given that Optimus Prime's pre-Prime name is (usually) Orion Pax, but where does that actually originate from and are that any other cases of Primes who had names that weren't just their old name with Prime added to the end? Also, are there any other pre-Prime names for OP besides Optronix and Optimus? Thank you ^w^
“Orion Pax” originated in the 1985 Generation 1 cartoon episode “War Dawn,” in which the young dock worker Orion is gravely injured by Megatron, then taken to Alpha Trion by the time-travelilng Aerialbots, where he is rebuilt as Optimus Prime. This was the first real origin story for Optimus Prime. Up to that point, the closest he’d come to a backstory was the Marvel Comics establishing him a soldier who worked his way up through the ranks to become leader.
The reason for the entirely different name was because, at this point in history, “Prime” hadn’t actually been established as a title - it was essentially just Optimus’s “surname.” Over in the Marvel stories, he was “Prime” even back before he became a soldier, long before he was ever leader. It wouldn’t be until the introduction of Rodimus Prime the next year that the idea of “Prime” as a title that was passed along with leadership came to be, and even after that, it took until 1990 for more Primes to be named, when the Marvel Comic finally identified “Sentinel Prime” as Optimus’s predecessor (which, of course, thoroughly confused the continuity of those early Marvel stories where he was Prime long before becoming leader).
As such, the closest we have to a Prime changing their name when they become Prime is “Hot Rod” becoming “Rodimus Prime,” and that’s just sticking “imus Prime” on the back end of his name. Otherwise, as shows like Animated have shown us, “Prime” has just become a title that you put after your name (”Sentinel” becoming “Sentinel Prime,” Longarm becoming “Longarm Prime,” etc).
As a side note, “War Dawn” and Rodimus taken together are also responsible for the widely-perceived idea that you get “recreated” into a bigger, more powerful “Prime” form by the Matrix when you take it on, which is actually historically not true. Orion was actually physically rebuilt into a war-capable configuration by Alpha Trion (with it having to be implicitly retconned in by later episodes that Alpha Trion gave him the Matrix offscreen, as the Matrix did not exist in cartoon lore at the time “War Dawn” was written), while Rodimus was recreated because he was the Chosen One. This perception saw Dreamwave have Optronix be recreated by the Matrix upon gaining it, but that’s the exception.
And yep, those names you list are the totality of Optimus’s pre-Prime names - Orion Pax in G1 and Aligned, Optronix in Dreamwave and Shattered Glass (he’s actually not named in the DW comics, but one of the tie-in novels, which also says he’s ”Orion to his friends”), and just plain “Optimus” in Animated and the movieverse. War for Cybertron, as I recall, had him just going by “Optimus” too, ignoring the “Orion” aspect of the Aligned backstory.
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