Anime distributor AnimEigo and parent company MediaOCD have announced the debut of Episode 4 of The Anime Business, a first-of-its-kind documentary series featuring interviews with a variety of pioneers of the Western anime industry. The latest episode features the second half or an extensive interview with John O’Donnell, the former Managing Director of Central Park Media.
Episode 4 is available now on the official AnimEigo YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@AnimEigo/videos
O’Donnell is one of the founding fathers of the North American anime industry. His company, Central Park Media (CPM), was among the first to license, dub and distribute anime home media for domestic audiences. In Episode 4, he reminisces how the retail market for anime exploded in the 1990s and how CPM overcame many of the challenges of licensing content from Japanese media companies and how he convinced major U.S. retailers to stock anime. He also explains how CPM diversified its product line and expanded into the burgeoning arena of manga publishing with CPM Press.
The Anime Business is an ongoing series featuring a wide range of entrepreneurs and visionaries that helped to pioneer and shape the North American anime industry. It is produced and hosted by industry veteran and MediaOCD founder and AnimEigo CEO Justin Sevakis.
All episodes of The Anime Business will be available in English. Japanese subtitles will also be available via a special grant from the Kleckner Foundation. Additional episodes and interviews are in production now. AnimEigo and MediaOCD invite fans that would like to help support and crowdfund future episodes of The Anime Business to donate at: https://www.mediaocd.com/plans-pricing
Episodes 1 -3 of The Anime Business are also now available to stream on the AnimEigo YouTube channel. Episode 1 features the first half of the interview with John O’Donnell. Episode 2 features an interview with Robert Napton, the former Director of Marketing and Producer of US Renditions and Managing Editor at Bandai Entertainment. Episode 3 features Pater Tatara, an entrepreneur who launched Anime NYC and helped to build the annual event into North America’s second biggest anime convention.
Justin Sevakis was the original founder of Anime News Network in 1998, and he contributed many of the site’s most popular columns for many years, in addition to co-hosting ANNCast, the #1 anime podcast worldwide, from 2009-2015. Sevakis was the first in-house video and subtitle editor at Central Park Media, a prominent 2000s era anime distributor, and worked on Grave of the Fireflies, Project A-ko and many other bestselling releases. With his current company, MediaOCD, he has produced more than 1,600 Blu-ray discs for North American market and pioneered restoration efforts for classic anime including Project A-ko, Digimon Adventure, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and the forthcoming Macross II. He acquired anime distributor AnimEigo in 2024.
Source: Press Release
