Ask John: Is Carl Macek’s Legacy Positive or Negative?

Question:
Carl Macek passed away. He was arguably the most polarizing figure in the American anime industry with more than his fair share of vocal supporters and heavy detractors. Ultimately though, do you think his legacy towards the American anime fandom was a good one or a bad one?

Answer:
As intelligent beings aware of our own mortality, humans have a tendency to avoid speaking ill of the dead. Furthermore, we have a tendency to reflect upon the positives of a life past, allowing once valid criticisms to be forgotten. I’ve never been a proponent of the “Americanization” of anime that Carl Macek propagated, but I also won’t allow my personal opinions to obscure due credit. Mr. Macek wasn’t the first American producer to edit, censor, and alter anime for American consumption, but he was the individual most singularly responsible for educating Americans about the origin of Japanese animation, ironically, at the same time he tried to downplay certain aspects of that origin.

In a 1988 printed interview in Viz-In issue 2, Macek explained, “People always criticize the fact that I sometimes cut stuff from the original material. I don’t do it because I want to. I was told to put together a series. The only thing that I felt it necessary to eliminate for a Western audience is what I call ethnic gestures… So, what you try to do is to homogenize the thing as much as possible, but keep the editing to a minimum. I think we actually improved the content.” Part of my own difference of opinion with Mr. Macek is grounded in a fundamentally contrasting approach to pop culture art. In the same interview, Mr. Macek explained, “Popular culture is not meant to be master work. If there is art in it, aesthetics, that’s tremendous. Some people examine every line as if it were the work of a great master. I disagree with that concept.” I do concede that not every anime production is a masterwork; however, while Macek presumed that all anime is inferior until proven otherwise, I expect anime to exhibit a commendable degree of creativity, artistry, and culture until proven otherwise. Mr. Macek may have had a very personable and charitable attitude, and may have been charming and well spoken. But all of that is beside the fact that he instinctively perceived anime as a marketable commodity to be reworked, altered, and “improved” by foreign businessmen who had no involvement with the original creative production. Macek’s objective, pragmatic approach certainly rankled the ire of “purist” anime fans, but it also laid the groundwork for the entire American anime distribution industry.

Streamline Pictures, which Macek worked for, was the first American distributor to consciously promote anime in America as literal imported Japanese animation. Streamline and Mr. Macek encouraged the American audience perception that its titles, including Robotech, Akira, Fist of the North Star, Lupin the Third, Dirty Pair, Captain Harlock, Robot Carnival, Vampire Hunter D, and many others, were distinctively different from conventional American cartoons. While prior American distributors licensed and distributed anime out of convenience or opportunity, Macek & Streamline built a business out of concentrating on licensing and localizing anime for American audiences. It’s fair to say that in practical terms, Mr. Macek’s efforts launched the American anime industry.

Streamline wasn’t the first domestic distributor to offer subtitled anime in America, but the company did make efforts in the early days of American anime home video distribution. There’s no way to guess if and how the American market for anime would have developed and grown had English dubbing and editing not been so prominent in the late 1980s. History can only be perceived in terms of what actually happened, not what might have happened. Macek’s rewrites, edits, and aggressive encouragement of dubbing placed anime before a larger American audience than ever before. While the popularization of Robotech, Akira, and Fist of the North Star contributed to making anime popular and commercially viable in America, the argument may be made that the product Macek popularized was actually not anime, but rather an altered, compromised form of Japanese animation separated from important Japanese characteristics like original Japanese dialogue and music.

The purist within me is eager to claim that if an American anime commerical distribution industry had evolved out of the existing fan distribution networks, the perception of anime as exploitive, cheaply produced foreign cartoons may be very different or non-existant in America today. The audience for anime in America may have never grown as temporarily large as it did, and at the same time cultural and artistic respect for anime may be greater than it is now. However, as mentioned, the past can only be criticized on the basis of fact, not extrapolated speculation. The fact that American co-productions like The Big O, D.I.C.E., The Animatrix, Halo Legends, and Afro Samurai exist may be credited to Carl Macek’s development of Robotech: The Sentinels, the first American created “anime.” Without Mr. Macek’s efforts, there’s no certainty that an American commercial anime distribution industry would have ever appeared at all. Streamline and Macek’s efforts and involvement in the American distribution of anime including Akira, Robot Carnival, Fist of the North Star, Twilight of the Cockroaches, “Neo Tokyo,” and Wicked City not only popularized anime in America, but informed Americans that anime was more than just the talking animals and veiled toy advertisements typically expected of children’s cartoons.

Carl Macek’s work set anime, both in America and Japan, on a new, unprecedented course. It’s possible, and legitimate, to argue that the course Macek laid out could have had different priorities and resulted in vastly different effects. Mr. Macek knew what he was doing at the time and certainly made his decisions with the knowledge that they could and would impact the future. We’ll never know if anime would have fared better or worse without Mr. Macek’s work. But the fact that an American anime distribution industry exists, and a large American audience for Japanese animation exists, has to be considered a positive legacy.