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http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/20 ... asses-away

Robotech producer's passing announced by Streamline co-founder Jerry Beck

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Animation historian Jerry Beck reported on his blog on Sunday that American producer Carl Macek passed away due to a heart attack on Saturday. Macek and Beck had co-founded the anime importing company Streamline Pictures in 1988.

Macek is best known for producing Robotech, the 1985 redubbed and edited adaptation of three different anime series — Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. He also worked on the dubbing of many anime projects from Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years (redubbed and edited adaptation of Captain Harlock and Queen Millennia) to more recently, Bleach and Naruto. His other dubbing production credits include Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival, My Neighbor Totoro, and Aura Battler Dunbine. Although Streamline Pictures did not dub the 1988 film Akira, it did release the film in theaters and on video tape in the United States.

The guy responsible for butchering and dumbing down a great series for the American market dies.

Xamindar wrote:The guy responsible for butchering and dumbing down a great series for the American market dies.

Um...try doing some research next time. What Macek did to Macross was the only way to get it to air on US television; the addition of Southern Cross and Mospeada to form Robotech was necessary due to the minimum requirements for TV syndication at the time. And while Robotech was edited for content to some extent, it still went way beyond anything else airing at the time. Characters had complex relationships with one another. People died for real and didn't magically come back to life. The story from episode to episode was serial and continuous. None of these things happened in ordinary cartoons, and as a result, Robotech managed to garner a large fanbase, many of whom went on to become fans of the medium of anime as a whole.

This is definitely a huge loss for the anime industry as a whole. Thanks to Carl Macek's work, anime has been able to achieve a mainstream (or close enough) presence in the US it never would have otherwise. As I heard someone aptly put it, "Without Robotech, there wouldn't be any kids wearing Naruto headbands today."

True that, but I was watching the original anime long before I ever saw Robotech. (Astroboy was one of the first “cartoons” using Japanese animators, and is the root of all anime)

Of course after the Japanese started to write their own stories in the medium, true anime was born.

Top Gun wrote:This is definitely a huge loss for the anime industry as a whole. Thanks to Carl Macek's work, anime has been able to achieve a mainstream (or close enough) presence in the US it never would have otherwise. As I heard someone aptly put it, "Without Robotech, there wouldn't be any kids wearing Naruto headbands today."

I admit I made my first statement in ignorance. But I really have to disagree with the above though. My first Anime was Macross and that was before I ever heard of Robotech. My father loved Robotech when he was younger but never had any interest in Anime and didn't seem to put the two in the same group. I'm pretty sure Anime became popular over here for other reasons (interesting and diverse stories, amazing character development, more availability in local stores, and the INTERNET). I know for a fact among my Anime loving friends that they mostly got interested in it by finding out about it on the internet and from other friends. Nothing to do with Robotech or the American media channels. But maybe I am in a different generation than you Top Gun.

Sad that he has passed, but I definitely don't see it as "This is definitely a huge loss for the anime industry as a whole". Now if Hayao Miyazaki died, then certainly.

Xamindar wrote:

Top Gun wrote:This is definitely a huge loss for the anime industry as a whole. Thanks to Carl Macek's work, anime has been able to achieve a mainstream (or close enough) presence in the US it never would have otherwise. As I heard someone aptly put it, "Without Robotech, there wouldn't be any kids wearing Naruto headbands today."

I admit I made my first statement in ignorance. But I really have to disagree with the above though. My first Anime was Macross and that was before I ever heard of Robotech. My father loved Robotech when he was younger but never had any interest in Anime and didn't seem to put the two in the same group. I'm pretty sure Anime became popular over here for other reasons (interesting and diverse stories, amazing character development, more availability in local stores, and the INTERNET). I know for a fact among my Anime loving friends that they mostly got interested in it by finding out about it on the internet and from other friends. Nothing to do with Robotech or the American media channels. But maybe I am in a different generation than you Top Gun.

You and Spidey are definitely exceptions to the rule, though I'm not so sure about the generational gap, at least not in your case. For one, Robotech aired in 1985, way before the days of widespread Internet fandom (and indeed, of widespread Internet presence as a whole). There wasn't any anime available in stores, and no centralized place to discuss it. Any anime that did make it over here was either one of a very few series that aired on TV in edited form, or else in hard-to-obtain copied VHS fansubs (and I think 1985 would be on the very early side of tape-trading, if it even existed then at all). Anime fandom then was a completely different world than its existence today, especially outside of Japan. I feel safe in stating that just about no one in the US had even heard of Macross, much less seen it, before Macek worked to bring it over here in the form of Robotech. There literally wasn't anything like it on TV at the time, and there are a whole lot of anime fans out there that can trace their fandom back to it. Macek's influence extended to a much broader scale, though; he co-founded the distribution company Streamline Pictures in 1987, which initially dubbed and/or released a number of influential anime titles at the time, including Vampire Hunter D and Akira. (This was literally the first US company to distribute anime series in their entirety.) He was also involved with a number of dubs on his own, including the original dubs of the earlier Studio Ghibli movies, and he remained active in the domestic anime industry up until his death. People involved in the industry today have stated that the anime landscape in the US would be far different without his work.

Sad that he has passed, but I definitely don't see it as "This is definitely a huge loss for the anime industry as a whole". Now if Hayao Miyazaki died, then certainly.

I probably should have phrased that as the "domestic industry," since the American market is the one that Macek greatly influenced. Obviously, losing someone of Miyazaki's stature on the Japanese production side of things would be a far greater loss to the world of anime as a whole.