Central Park Media

» see centralparkmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Central Park Media opened on 11 april 1990. John O'Donnell had come out of Sony Video Software, where he was the one pushing early dubs like Tranzor Z and Voltron into American homes, and he started CPM to keep doing that without asking anyone's permission. The first tape it actually shipped was Dominion Tank Police, on VHS, in november 1991.

The company ran under several names at once. US Manga Corps took the general catalog from 1991 and Software Sculptors took the titles that did not fit under it. CPM Press published manga and manhwa, while Asia Pulp Cinema handled live action. Anime 18 was the adult label, and it is the label that paid for a lot of the rest. In 1992 CPM put out Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend, the first animated film in the United States to be given an NC-17 rating.

The catalog is why the name still gets said out loud. Grave of the Fireflies reached English through CPM, and so did Revolutionary Girl Utena. Slayers and Patlabor came the same way. None of those were obvious commercial bets at the time they were bought, which is the whole job: somebody sits in an office in New York and decides that a specific Japanese show is worth paying for in a market that has not asked for it yet.

I have no memory of that logo, because nothing CPM pressed was ever going to sit on a shelf in Ankara. Japanese animation reached me dubbed into Turkish on television, with nothing on screen to say who had bought it or from whom. Later, once the modem was fast enough to be worth the phone bill, it reached me as fansubs with no company name on them at all. The licensing layer that CPM lived and died inside was an American layer. From where I was sitting there was no layer, only cartoons that showed up.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

By the late 1990s CPM had expanded to ten thousand square feet of Manhattan office space and a release slate that ran the full width of the medium. The economics looked strange from outside and made sense from inside. You bought North American rights to a show that had already been paid for once in Japan, then covered the dubbing yourself, against sales in a market that had to be built one video store at a time.

It had a web arm too, which is easy to forget now. Binary Media Works ran the company's sites, including AnimeOne.com and UFOCity.com, back when a distributor putting up a website was a strategic decision rather than an assumption.

~ the unraveling ~

The first cut came in 2005, in the comic book and sales departments, when book sales slowed. The second came on 26 may 2006 and was much bigger. CPM pointed at Musicland, whose bankruptcy that year had left a hole where a serious chunk of its receivables used to be.

Musicland is the part worth sitting with for a second. Suncoast Motion Picture Company and Sam Goody were its stores, and those were where a great deal of American anime was actually bought by actual people. When the parent went under, so did the money it owed the companies that filled its racks. A licensor is only ever as solid as the shelf it ships to, and CPM found that out three years before the paperwork caught up.

~ the day it died ~

There had been no new release in the twelve months before the end. The Chapter 7 petition went in on friday 24 april 2009 and was reported the following week. The figures in it are small in a way that reads worse than a large collapse: 126,282 dollars in assets, 908,173 in secured liabilities with Bank of America as the only secured creditor, another 277,531 unsecured, the landlord and the law firm at the front of that line.

Chapter 7 is liquidation. There is no version of it where the company comes back with a smaller staff and a better plan. Former management did not comment when the trade press called.

~ the long tail ~

The licenses went to auction in june 2009 and were bought up by the companies that were still standing. Funimation and Media Blasters took most of it. ADV Films picked up some as well, which is its own small joke, because ADV ceased all operations four months later and had to hand everything to five successor firms in a single day.

So the catalog survived and the company did not. Grave of the Fireflies has been relicensed more than once since, and most people watching it now have never seen the words US Manga Corps in their lives. That is roughly what happens to a middleman when the middle stops being a place you can stand.

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