R.I.P. Carl Macek (1951 - 2010)

Such a loss. Just spotted this sad news on another forum a little while ago. Apparently Carl Macek died of a heart attack this past Saturday (4/17). There's a nice tribute to him on this site with lots of comments posted by people he actually knew and worked with throughtout the years:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/anime/carl-m ... -2010.html

Also, Robotech.com has set up this memorial page as well as having their own tribute article to him on their site's main homepage, which also features comments from yet more people he worked with over the years:
http://www.carlmacek.com/

He did so much for the American anime scene including many unseen contributions that most, including myself, would never know about until reading that first tribute article. Such as, his involvement in localizing Naruto and Bleach. Hard to say if anime would have ever caught on like it has done were it not for his often unseen role in anime production. I can't say for certain that I would have ever developed such an interest in anime had it not been for seeing Robotech as a young child.

Anime News Network conducted a really good, nearly two hour long, interview with Carl Macek just this past January as part of a monthly "podcast" program they do. Worth downloading if his work interests you in the least, quite fantatic to hear about the early days of the American anime scene as well as other ventures he was involved in:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/anncast/2010-01-14

Rest in peace Carl Macek.

May he rest in peace. I just recently started watching Robotech for the first time. It's quite an amazing work, especially considering how old it is now. It has held up well. It sounds like this fellow contributed a lot to the anime scene, but also to the gaming scene by extension. Even though they remain separate in many ways, the two have also become forever intertwined by games with anime style graphics, like Phantasy Star. The success of Carl Macek's anime projects help to pave the way for these games as well as other anime.

Interesting article(s). Sorry to hear of his passing. He was very talented and contributed a lot to many specific fields, etc. He will be missed.

My condolences to his family, friends, and many fans.

You know.. Robotech was done in under 6 months. It was done to a silent copy. Such a feat is seldom done and in such a short time.

The japanese couldn't translate the scripts right so the 4 writers wrote from scratch for every episode. Macek had the Robotech bible, the ideas and bounced from script to script telling what needed to be done and they wrote.

It is amazing how close they got to the original and in fact, the original creators quoted the Robotech scripts to be superior to the original japanese.

In fact, the interview Greg Snegoff did for Shadow Chronicles News 4 years ago highlights just how intense it was. The VAS didn't have time to cash their checks and slept in the hallways to get it done.

And you know they pieced together one entire new episode using clips from other episodes in order to round out the series to 85 episodes. Quite possibly that may have been the first time a flashback episode was produced in animation, at least in any English animation.

Robotech is awesome though. Have any of you read the Jack McKinney novels? The novels follow the series faithfully and continues on where it left off using the story Carl Macek and his writing team had conceived, but never got the financial backing to have animated. Haven't finished buying them all yet myself, there's either 20 or 22 in all, each novel covering six episodes worth of story. Lots of extra background material in them as well, like at the beginning of each chapter there's an excerpt from various books of human history as recorded by main characters from the series late in their lives. Really incredible books to read.

Carl was one of my idols. I worshipped the man. I treated him as if he was Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, or any legendary hollywood filmmaker because of all the things he did that helped popularize the anime industry in North America. Robotech is my all-time favorite anime. And I also loved his work on Golgo 13, Vampire Hunter D, The Dirty Pair:Project Eden, and Zillion.