Anime distributor AnimEigo and parent company MediaOCD has announced the debut of Episode 2 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 installment of the ongoing series features Robert Napton, the former Director of Marketing and Producer of US Renditions and Managing Editor at Bandai Entertainment.
As anime has grown from modest beginnings into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, The Anime Business provides insights from many notable people that played important roles in helping to popularize the genre in North America at various stages of its evolution.
Episode 2 is available now on the official AnimEigo YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@AnimEigo/videos
In the latest installment, Robert Napton recalls his days at U.S. Renditions, which was the Special Projects Division of Books Nippan (the American branch of Nippon Shuppan Hanbai) and one of the pioneers of anime home video distribution in North America. Napton reminiscences about titles such as Gunbuster, Eureka Seven, Appleseed, Black Magic M-66, Dangaio The Complete Series, and Outlanders as well as his tenure at Bandai Entertainment and releases such as Lucky Star and more.
The Anime Business Episode 1 is also now available to stream on the AnimEigo YouTube channel and features an interview with John O’Donnell, former Managing Director of Central Park Media.
All episodes 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
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.
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
