Carl Macek. The very name, and the man who bears it, was equally revered and reviled by Western anime fans from the 1980s all the way to the turn of the century. To his detractors he is known as Carl the Butcher, while his supporters liken him to some Moses-like figure who delivered his pilgrims to the land of sake and honey. No matter the stance, however, one irrefutable fact remains: Carl Macek is one of the forefathers responsible for the invasion of Japanese animation into the West. And without him, your anime collection... not to mention the Anime Academy... would not be here today.

During the 1970s, Carl Macek was a librarian and served as the curator of the archive of popular culture at Cal State Fullerton. While there, he became acutely aware of anime from the college students whom wanted an alternative to American cartoons. From his research, Macek dove headfirst into the likes of Nagai Go and other popular Japanese artists of that era. It wasn't until he saw the Miyazaki Hayao film Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, however, that Macek became fully enamored with Japanese animation and sought to demystify anime culture and bring it to the United States, a task that no one until then had been able to accomplish with any measure of success.

The early '80s proved to be a critical time for both this man and the anime industry in the West. Macek was brought on board with licensing company Harmony Gold and was put to work in marketing its toy merchandise. Harmony Gold struck a deal with Revell to manufacture a line of toys inspired by the burgeoning mecha anime market. One of those anime was Macross. Given the unenviable task of porting over an anime to the United States as a promotional tool (and told to make it fit a minimum sixty-five-episode format to make it more palatable to American viewing tastes), Carl Macek quickly licensed three completely unrelated anime, Macross, Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, and combined them to form the 85-episode epic Robotech.

Robotech, especially the Macross portion, became wildly popular with American youth during the 1980s. It offered what no domestic cartoon at the time could: a continuing storyline filled with intrigue, romance, thrilling action and the harsh realities of war. But in order to combine those three anime into one show, Macek and Harmony Gold took great liberties in changing events, music, plot devices, names and even relationships to make it as seamless as possible. To make matters even worse, Macek was allowed just four months to complete this conversion. With multiple shifts working day and night, his crew was forced to dub the voices, compose music and make script changes on the fly at the tune of four episodes a week to meet their deadline. The result was an admittedly haphazard finished product that was held together with hope and a prayer.

Anime purists absolutely balked. Dubbed Carl the Butcher, Macek was burned in effigy for the numerous plotholes, terrible voice acting and dramatic alterations in dialogue... and rightfully so. However, no one then could predict just how tremendously popular anime would become outside of Japan because of Robotech; Macek's enemies were too shortsighted, only seeing the splash he had made but not the ripples across the pond.

Macek's third splash came when Tokuma Shoten, parent company of Studio Ghibli, sold to Streamline the distribution rights to Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. Still reeling over the horrendous "adaptation" of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind titled Warriors of the Wind, Studio Ghibli kept close tabs on Streamline's handling of their other movies and were happy with the results. Indeed to this day, Streamline's Ghibli dubs are examples of excellent voice dubbing and translation; Macek, being a Miyazaki fan, wouldn't have it any other way, making sure the American adaptations were met with Studio Ghibli's satisfaction. Macek has since left Streamline Pictures and came under the brief employ of DiC and then ADV Films; today, he is a fixture at many science fiction and anime conventions across the United States.

It is said that time hath the power to heal all wounds, and no truer words can apply to this man. Many of his former detractors have since changed their tunes and praised Macek for his efforts in making anime mainstream across the Pacific Ocean. The fruits of his labor can be seen on television and on the faces of tens of thousands of Western anime fans who make the pilgrimage to anime conventions from coast to coast. Whether you agree with his methods or philosophy matters not, for remember that pond I mentioned earlier? It still has ripples.