By David Wharton | 8 years ago

Comic-Con is full of sights you’re unlikely to see anywhere else. People sitting in fancy streetside restaurants dressed as zombies, stormtroopers, Pokemon, and anything else you can imagine. Socially awkward guys posing for pictures with genre-themed, scantily clad models. Famous people wandering the dealer’s room floor in disguise so they can get some shopping down without being mobbed. This year you can add another unlikely sight to the list: retired CNN host Larry King will be attending Comic-Con to interview Optimus Prime.

No, sadly that doesn’t mean you’ll get to see King on stage with a 40-foot transforming robot. He will instead be interviewing voice actor Peter Cullen, who has been lending his pipes to Optimus Prime since the ’80s, along with voicing countless other animated characters over the past three decades. The NY Times reports that the Cullen/King interview will unfold on July 13th, as part of a panel to promote the Transformers Prime cartoon that airs on the Hub cable network. If the thought of Larry King interviewing a cartoon actor at Comic-Con seems strange, it was almost even weirder. One of the other people considered for the job was Inside the Actor’s Studio host James Lipton, but The Hub didn’t want to fork over Lipton’s $70,000 asking price. Personally, I wish they’d hired Will Ferrell pretending to be James Lipton.

Comic-Con will invade San Diego this July 12 – 15. If you’d like to go and don’t already have hotel reservations, you better start making burnt offerings to whatever deity you revere, ’cause otherwise you’re right well screwed.

Larry King photo by Angela George