by the fans for the fans

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www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/...05/06/apop050610.DTL


The 'Robotech' master
By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, May 6, 2010

There's a certain basket of phrases used to describe those individuals whose life's work leads to the launch, not of mere products or brands, but entire industries and worldviews. They're "passionate," "perfectionist," "controversial"; they're "willing to step on toes" and "do whatever it takes" to materialize their grand visions.

This past weekend, friends, family and admirers gathered at a church in Southern California to honor the memory of a man who epitomized such words, and whose impact on American pop culture was in its own way as profound as any figure in his generation.

Carl Macek -- "Uncle Carl" to his admirers and even some of his detractors -- died of a heart attack on April 17, at the age of 59. His legacy in the field of animation was enormous and multilateral: He documented the creation of the groundbreaking 1981 adult animated feature "Heavy Metal" in the book "Art of Heavy Metal: Animation for the Eighties" and co-wrote its sequel, "Heavy Metal 2000."

He was John Kricfalusi's original partner in Spumco, the studio that spawned "Ren and Stimpy" and launched the gross-out insurgency in American cartoons. He was a close friend and collaborator with stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen, of "King Kong," "Sinbad" and "Clash of the Titans" fame: The two co-wrote the book "War Eagles," and at the time of his death, Macek was developing a mysterious movie project bearing only Harryhausen's name as its title.

But it's in the world of anime where Macek made his most indelible mark. Indeed, it's fair to say that Macek is directly responsible for the mainstreaming of Japanese animation in America, both as a content industry and as a primary creative influence for many of today's most interesting comic and cartoon artists.

"Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people discovered anime through Macek's work, including a lot of the fans who went on to found North America's anime industry," says Christopher Macdonald, the Montreal-based CEO and editor-in-chief of Anime News Network. "You could make the case that the popularization of anime might have happened anyway, but the fact is, Macek was the one who did it."

He did it twice, in fact.

The first time was in 1985, when a work he created opened the way for Japanese animation to become a staple of U.S. television, bringing a new kind of epic storytelling to the airwaves. The revolution's name was "Robotech".

Seeding the protoculture

It was 1984, and TV producer Carl Macek had been handed an unusual assignment by his then-employer, television packager Harmony Gold USA.

A competitor, World Events Production, had taken a Japanese animated series called "Beast King Go Lion" and turned it into a smash-hit syndicated series in the U.S., "Voltron: Defender of the Universe."

Building on that success, Harmony Gold acquired the rights to a three-part animated "mecha" series from a Japanese partner, Tatsunoko Productions: "Super Dimension Fortress Macross," "Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross," and "Genesis Climber Mospeada."

The shows were visually stunning, with designs far more intricate than those seen in "Voltron," and thrilling widescreen space combat. Unfortunately, they suffered from one common problem: They were too short. Selling a series for daily syndication required a minimum of 65 episodes (13 weeks of five-day-a-week programming), and the longest of the series, "Macross," had just 36.

The only solution, from Macek's perspective, was to combine all three series into one. But how? Other than their visual similarity -- due to sharing the same genre and cluster of creators -- the trio of programs had unrelated plots, different casts and divergent settings.

Never one to turn down a challenge, Macek got to work.

What emerged was a truly ambitious new storyline, different from any of the three original programs. In Macek's blueprint, each installment of the series tells the story of a different chapter of the same titanic global conflict, with new relationships among the casts reverse-engineered into being. The Macguffin that holds it all together: A life-giving cosmic substance known as "protoculture," which is the secret to intergalactic travel and thus, the most precious material in the universe.

The "Robotech" saga spans three generations of war over this scarce resource, launched after a gigantic space fortress crash-lands on Earth, in a story that seems oddly resonant today -- rich as it is with ripped-from-the-headlines memes like the invasion and occupation of foreign territory, motivated by control of a scarce energy resource; "sleeper cell" aliens hiding in friendly human form; and even suicide attacks by beings motivated by an incomprehensibly fanatical zeal.

"The fact that three different series with three different plots fit together so evenly is fundamentally amazing, and a credit to Carl's ability to tell a story," says Tommy Yune, Harmony Gold USA's creative director and the current caretaker of the "Robotech" legacy. "Audiences bought what he'd conceived of hook, line and sinker."

Macek had created an unusual hybrid -- a work with the genuine aesthetics and flavor of anime, but a plot and identity forged in the U.S. It was, if you will, a masterful work of Asian/American fusion. And like most attempts to blur the lines between cultures, it provoked hostility from those who saw such mixing as an atrocity. The hardcore fans, the ones who'd seen the original Japanese series via convention screenings and unlicensed fan-subtitled tapes, began referring to the process of altering anime for U.S. consumption with an unkind homage. They called it "Macekering" the original, pronounced the same as "massacre," naturally.

"I think Carl was unfairly maligned," says Yune. " And the thing is, he would sometimes butt heads with fans and other people in the industry -- he was certainly opinionated. But as time passed, people have realized he wasn't trying to 'bastardize' the works. Ninety percent of the characterizations and underlying drama of the original series were intact. He did what he had do to get these shows he genuinely loved onto the air."

Yune points out that earlier shows, from "Voltron" and "Star Blazers" to "Speed Racer" and "Astro Boy," were actually far more mangled in their adaptations.

"Carl never softened the drama," he says. "He tried to preserve all the story elements he could. And that was why "Robotech" felt so dramatically different than anything that had come before. Because it felt like real anime."

The second Macek revolution

Whetted by this taste of what real anime was all about, many fans began to seek out original works -- most of which were unavailable in any legal licensed form.

In 1987, a few years after the end of "Robotech"'s televised run, a young animation curator working for the Landmark Theaters chain, Jerry Beck, had been tasked with creating animation packages for booking into the company's arthouse cinemas. Part of his job was helping to program what would become one of the first annual animation festivals, the Los Angeles Animation Celebration.

A longtime anime enthusiast, Beck sensed that a tipping point had been reached in the number of fans of the medium. He lobbied to include two anime features in the lineup for the first Animation Celebration -- the wondrous "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" by modern master Hayao Miyazaki, and Carl Macek's feature-film sequel to the "Robotech" series, "Robotech: The Movie."

"We put 'Robotech' in the big auditorium, and they sold out instantly," says Beck. "I was in the back, watching it in standing room, and Carl was right there next to me. The reaction was amazing. The audience was loving it. And I whispered to him, 'They're eating it up!' And he shrugged and said, 'That's the way it always is.'"

Shortly thereafter, Beck and Macek formed a company, Streamline Pictures, that distributed many of Miyazaki's greatest works -- "Laputa: Castle in the Sky," "My Neighbor Totoro," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "The Castle of Cagliostro." They were also responsible for popularizing the film that arguably was most responsible for anime's breakthrough into mainstream popular culture: Katsuhiro Otomo's sleek, corrosively brilliant work of dystopian science fiction, "Akira."

"You have to understand that even the Japanese studios didn't really get the value of what they had at the time," says Beck. "I remember that when we were decorating our offices, I thought it would be a great idea to get some of the original cels from 'Akira' to hang on our walls. And so Carl gave the Kodansha people a call, and discovered they had stuff sitting in a warehouse, waiting to be disposed of. We frantically told them to ship it to us."

A few months later, 200 boxes containing original "Akira" art were unloaded onto the sidewalk in front of their building. "And when we took a look at the crumpled balls of material that were used as packing material for the cels," Beck recalls, "we realized that they were the original hand-painted background art for the cels, all scrunched up and mangled. We spent all afternoon carefully flattening them out."

The next generation

Streamline folded in 2002, having proven anime's viability as a theatrical medium, though never at the blockbuster level that Macek hoped, and as a home-video staple, though rampant piracy has since eaten drastically into the industry's profitability.

And when Macek passed away, "Robotech" had still barely tapped the vast ideas he'd outlined for the story's future.

"Carl had notes on where 'Robotech' was going to go -- it was a huge, incredibly ambitious saga, that would eventually take the plot into a giant loop, ending where it began," says Yune, who directed Harmony Gold's first completely original animated followup to "Robotech," "Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles."

In the year before Macek's death, Yune had recruited him back home to Harmony Gold, hoping to give his vision new life, with "Robotech" celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. The two were planning the next installment of the franchise, to be called "Robotech: Shadow Rising." <o> "I've been telling people that that's the greatest tragedy," Yune says. "I thought Carl was on roll, and that he was on the verge of doing his best work."

But even with Macek's passing, the protoculture that he's seeded continues to thrive. "Right now, we're entering into exciting new territory," says Yune. "Warner Brothers had acquired the live-action rights for "Robotech," which is being developed by Tobey Maguire's production company. And we have a huge number of "Robotech" 25th anniversary events planned over the course of the year."

The centerpiece of the tour will be a massive traveling exhibit, built by Toyfusion and expected to debut at the California State Fair in Sacramento this summer, and then to tour other state fairs around the country.

"We've made one big change to the exhibit," adds Yune. "We're making it not just a history of Robotech, but a tribute to Carl."

I'll let Carl's widow, Svea Macek, have the last word on her husband. Reached shortly after I spoke with Tommy Yune, she told me: "When I met Carl, I was instantly fascinated. His creativity was limitless -- he had ideas bubbling up all the time. And he was very generous with his time and knowledge. He appreciated my talents, and we worked together for 30 years. The loss of Carl is profound not just for myself, but for a culture he was very much a part of, and much shaped. But there's something he often wrote along with his signature for his fans: 'The best is yet to come.'"

And given the promise still locked up in the brain trust he left behind, there's plenty of reason to believe that's true.

DANG! THAT'S ONE OF THE THINGS I WAS WORKING WITH CARL MACEK. I HIGHLIGHTED IT.

BUT NOW TOYFUSION AND I WITH HG ARE WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY THERE.

OH BOY. CAT OUT OF THE BAG

Thanks for the report!