Carl Macek, 1951-2010.

I saw the news that Robotech creator Carl Macek had died on Saturday, making it a sad day for all old-school anime fans indeed. As the main person involved with bringing the popular Super Dimensional Fortress Macross series to the English language as Robotech, Carl Macek can be credited with introducing a generation to Japanese animation and doing more to make “anime” a household name than anyone before Katsuhiro Otomo and his film Akira. Of course, no one is going to accuse Mr. Macek of being perfect. His “Will it blend?” approach to joining unrelated shows is fairly annoying to us now, although he did have his reasons for combining three different series into one gestalt (television stations required at least 65 episodes for syndication, so he needed to find additional material from somewhere). I’ve been attending anime conventions since the late 1980s and met Mr. Macek and his wife many times, and I always admired him and was happy to work in the same industry as him. Tonight I will certainly raise a glass in toast to Carl Macek.

What do you think? Was Carl Macek the “Gene Roddenberry” of the anime world? Or have I been sniffing too much glue? If you’re younger than a certain age you likely won’t have an opinion, since you’ll have only watched decently translated anime that wasn’t changed around to fit an external plan. Give me your thoughts in the comments.

Carl Macek helped make anime what it is today.