Anime Industry Veteran Mike Pascuzzi Reflects on His Tenure at Central Park Media and Helping to Bring Anime to the Mainstream

Anime distributor AnimEigo and parent company MediaOCD have released the latest episode of The Anime Business on YouTube featuring an interview with former sales and marketing director of Central Park Media, Mark Pascuzzi, who played a pivotal role in helping bring anime to the mainstream in the 1990s.

The Anime Business Episode 16 is available on the official AnimEigo YouTube Channel.

Pascuzzi’s background was in the music industry and as a video buyer, but he entered the fledgling North American anime industry in 1990 after meeting Central Park Media founder John O’Donnell. He was CPM’s first employee and went on to help build the company into a major player during the first decade of the massive expansion of anime fandom in North America. (Additional insights on CPM are available from founder John O’Donnell in The Anime Business Episodes 1 & 4)

By the early 1990s, CPM was making its mark with VHS releases such as M.D. Geist and Project A-KO. A handful of other American based distributors such as AnimEgo, US Renditions, A.D. Vision and Streamline were also operating (and are also covered in past Anime Business episodes), but CPM gained major market share by being the first to get its titles into national video rental stores and retail chains and augmenting it will a strong direct sales operation.

Revenues grew as John O’Donnell licensed a substantial and eclectic array of titles and Pascuzzi leveraged relationships with all the major chains to stock them. Titles such as Slayers, Grave of the Fireflies, Dominion Tank Police, Record of Lodoss War, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and more controversial 18+ releases such as Legend of the Overfiend (Urotsukidoji).

As the transition of home media from VHS to DVD presented new opportunities, Pascuzzi notes that CPM was the first domestic company to produce DVDs for anime series with the release of Battle Arena Toshinden in early 1998. DVD quickly became a favorite format for fans and collectors. CPM also pioneered producing DVD box sets for series titles. The company continued to grow and Pascuzzi led the charge to bring anime titles to popular chains like Blockbuster, Tower Records, Transworld, and Suncoast and Musicland.

In 2001, following 9/11, Mike Pascuzzi departed CPM and New York City to work for a time with John Sirabella, a former CPM alumni who launched his own anime distribution company, Media Blasters (Sirabella is interviewed in The Anime Business Eps.10).

Pascuzzi goes on to reflect on massive changes and technological innovations that forever altered the market and the demise of DVD and rental chains as well as market changes following the financial crash of 2008. He also notes some serious health problems that he battled and won. But he remains proud of his contributions and enthusiastic about the enduring popularity of anime and how it will continue to expand and evolve with new generations of fans.  

The Anime Business is a first-of-its-kind series featuring a wide range of entrepreneurs and visionaries that helped to pioneer and shape the North American anime and manga industries. It is produced and hosted by industry veteran and MediaOCD founder and AnimEigo CEO Justin Sevakis. Episodes 1-12 of The Anime Business and bonus clips are also now available to stream on the AnimeEigo YouTube channel.  All episodes of The Anime Business are available in English. Japanese subtitles are also available via a special grant from the Kleckner Foundation.

About AnimEigo:

AnimEigo is a division of MediaOCD and was founded in 1989 as one the first distributors to focus on anime and an array of acclaimed Japanese live-action films in the United States and Canada. Over the last 35 years, AnimEigo consistently broadened the market for Japanese content by cultivating audiences for new genres of film. 

Renowned for high quality translations, subtitles, and dubbing, AnimEigo has released a wide variety of classic anime titles. For more information, please visit: mediaocd.com.