Central Park Media

• 1. Introduction

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  Central Park Media Corporation got its name from a corner. The company's offices sat at 250 West 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan, right on the edge of Central Park, and that geographic accident shaped everything about how it presented itself to the world. From those offices, a team of American entertainment entrepreneurs did something that had almost never been attempted before: they introduced North American audiences to anime, manga, manhwa, and East Asian cinema on a serious commercial scale. They were one of the first companies to tackle that distribution challenge, and the catalog they built over nearly two decades spans everything from beloved fantasy series to some of the most controversial animated films ever sold in the United States. By the time they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on the 27th of April 2009, Central Park Media had left a permanent mark on how anime reached American living rooms.

• 2. John O'Donnell's Founding Vision

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  John O'Donnell founded Central Park Media in 1990, bringing with him a specific kind of expertise. He had previously founded Sony Video Software, where he had championed the anime titles Tranzor Z and Voltron: Defender of the Universe, giving him a concrete sense of what American audiences might accept from Japanese animation. That earlier experience made him unusually well-positioned to build a dedicated anime supplier from scratch.

  MD Geist became a surprising emblem of the company's early identity. CPM incorporated the character into the US Manga Corps logo, and curiosity from anime fans who kept seeing this mechanical figure in CPM's releases turned MD Geist into one of the company's bestselling titles. The character's commercial success prompted O'Donnell's team to commission something unusual: in 1996, CPM asked MD Geist creator Koichi Ohata to write and direct a full sequel, while simultaneously producing a director's cut of the original with new scenes added to expand the storyline.

  The Fisk Building at 250 West 57th Street was always the physical anchor of the operation. CPM started there with just 3,400 square feet of space. By 1996 they had grown to 7,000 square feet, and by January 2000 the offices stretched to 10,000 square feet, a straightforward physical measure of how much the business had expanded in its first decade.

• 3. The NC-17 Milestone

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  In 1992, through its adult animation division Anime 18, CPM released Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend, a title that immediately entered American legal and cultural history. It became the first animated film to receive the NC-17 rating, a distinction that set it apart from everything that had come before it in the American market. The film was released in theaters across the United States in both subtitled and dubbed formats.

  Urotsukidoji's legacy is genuinely dual. Among fans of anime, science fiction, and horror, it became a cult classic that is still discussed decades after its release. At the same time, it functioned as the first hentai title to introduce the western public to that genre of adult animation. CPM, through its Anime 18 division, is largely credited with making hentai commercially available in North America, a development that carried significant cultural consequences for how anime as a whole was perceived and regulated in the United States.

  Anime 18 operated under several labels. The main Anime 18 label handled hentai anime; Manga 18 covered manga and manhwa for adult audiences; Be Beautiful Manga focused on yaoi manga. Among Anime 18's catalog was also Toshio Maeda's La Blue Girl, another title that drew both controversy and a dedicated following.

• 4. Divisions and Scope

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  Software Sculptors was founded in 1993 by John Sirabella, Sam Liebowitz, and Henry Lai, originally as an independent company specializing in anime-related software. Their releases included screen savers featuring Ranma 1/2 and Bubblegum Crisis, as well as anime distributed on CD-ROM. CPM eventually acquired Software Sculptors and absorbed it as a division label. Sirabella remained with CPM until 1997, after which he went on to found Media Blasters.

  Asia Pulp Cinema, which began in 1999, handled CPM's East Asian live-action film distribution. The division was best known for carrying Japanese erotic films, with actress Kei Mizutani appearing in many of them, alongside films aimed at otaku subculture audiences, including a series called the Akihabara Trilogy.

  Binary Media Works operated two websites: AnimeOne.com, which served the anime fan community, and UFOCity.com, a platform for UFO enthusiasts that hosted a community dedicated to alien sighting reports. Binary Media Works was shut down in 2004. The company's original direct sales arm, MangaMania, handled phone and mail orders before being acquired and operated by Right Stuf, Inc. CPM Press, which began as CPM Comics and later became CPM Manga, also ran a short-lived adult print imprint called Bear Bear Press starting in 1996; it released only La Blue Girl and Demon Beast Invasion before folding that same year.

• 5. Distribution Firsts

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  CPM was among the first suppliers to sell anime as box sets, a format that would later become standard in the industry. In 2002, the Collector's Edition of Grave of the Fireflies introduced something that had not been done before in anime home video: the storyboards were included as an alternate viewing option, with more than 2,700 hand drawings synced to the film's audio tracks.

  Anime Test Drive, launched in 2003, was a promotional program designed to lower the barrier for American buyers unfamiliar with anime. Each DVD offered two episodes of a given series alongside 45 minutes of trailers, sold at a discounted rate to expose titles that might otherwise have seemed too expensive or inconvenient to purchase.

  In 2004, CPM introduced Korean animation to American audiences following the commercial success of productions like the Animatrix, Aeon Flux, and Cubix, releasing Doggy Poo as an early example of that strategy. By 2005, CPM had sub-licensed seven anime titles to the US-based International Channel and was also licensing content to the broadband streaming service Movielink. In 2006 the company licensed some of its catalog to IGN Entertainment's digital download store Direct2Drive. In 2007, CPM licensed Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Movie, Roujin Z, the Record of Lodoss War series, the Project A-ko series, Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, and Grave of the Fireflies to the Funimation Channel for broadcast.

• 6. Financial Collapse

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  On the 26th of May 2006, Central Park Media laid off a substantial portion of its workforce. Rumors circulated immediately that bankruptcy was imminent, fueled in part by a statement made by a company representative at the Anime Boston convention. The following Monday, CPM's managing director issued a public statement confirming the layoffs and attributing them to creditor problems that stemmed from the January bankruptcy of the Musicland group.

  The trouble had started earlier. In 2005, CPM had already discontinued its CPM Manga and CPM Manhwa lines because of monetary difficulties, though company representatives said those lines relaunched in January 2006. A legal dispute compounded the strain: on the 19th of March 2007, Japanese yaoi publisher Libre posted a notice on its website alleging that CPM's Be Beautiful division had been illegally translating and selling its properties. The titles at issue had originally been licensed to CPM by Japanese publisher Biblos, which Libre had acquired in 2006 after Biblos went through its own bankruptcy.

  CPM filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on the 27th of April 2009, liquidating with a debt of over 1.2 million US dollars. Right up to that filing, the company had continued licensing anime titles for North American television and video-on-demand distribution, even though it had not released anything on home video for more than a year. After closure, the centralparkmedia.com domain was eventually transferred to a New York-based art dealer called Atelier VGI.

• 7. The Catalog's Second Life

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  Grave of the Fireflies, one of the most prominent titles in CPM's catalog, was re-licensed after the bankruptcy by Sentai Filmworks, the successor to ADV Films, and re-released in 2012. Other former CPM properties moved through companies including ADV Films, Bandai Entertainment, Funimation, Sentai Filmworks, Discotek Media, Nozomi Entertainment, and Media Blasters, with re-releases running from 2004 into the present.

  Some titles received new dubbing in the process. Here Is Greenwood was re-dubbed by Media Blasters, and Area 88 received a new dub from ADV Films. Others kept the original CPM dub intact. Certain Anime 18 properties were transferred specifically to Critical Mass Video and Kitty Media when CPM went bankrupt in 2009.

  The company itself remained nominally active as of the 3rd of July 2023, though without most of the assets it once held. John Sirabella, who had left CPM in 1997 to start Media Blasters, ended up as one of the companies that inherited portions of the catalog his former employer had built, a quiet full-circle moment for one of the figures who had helped shape CPM's early divisions.