AnimEigo Interviews Streamline Pictures Founder Jerry Beck

AnimEigo and its parent company MediaOCD have put out a new episode of their YouTube series The Anime Business. The show is a documentary that looks back at the people who helped bring anime to fans in the West, and the newest installment sits down with Jerry Beck.

Beck is a well known animation historian and author, and he was one of the people who started Streamline Pictures. That company played a big part in bringing anime films and home video to American audiences through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Episode 9 is out now on the official AnimEigo YouTube channel.

Beck grew up in Flushing, Queens during the 1960s and 1970s, where he fell for classic cartoons and comic books early on. His love of Japanese animation took hold after he caught shows like Great Mazinger and Himitsu Sentai Gorenger on a local New York TV channel, and before long he was screening 16mm prints of anime at comic conventions.

He spent years in film distribution for studios such as Orion Pictures and United Artists, though there was little appetite for anime in the United States back then. After meeting producer Terry Thoren he moved to Los Angeles, helped launch Animation Magazine, and handled distribution for Thoren’s Expanded Entertainment. Things really shifted in 1987, when he screened Robotech: The Movie and Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky at the first World Animation Festival and met Robotech producer Carl Macek.

Beck and Macek founded Streamline Pictures in 1989, making it one of the first American companies to license anime for theaters here. Its first release was an English dubbed print of Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and it went on to handle titles like Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Lensman, and Twilight of the Cockroaches, along with home video for Wicked City, Fist of the North Star, and Robot Carnival. The studio even secured the home media rights to Robotech before it stopped releasing new titles in 1997 and closed in 2000.

My take: It is easy to forget how much quiet work went into getting anime onto screens over here, so it is lovely to see AnimEigo giving people like Jerry Beck their flowers while they can still tell the story in their own words.