Toonami

[Dr. Insomniac]

The Toonami crew treated Andy Merrill like shit and basically had their own secret club with Lazzo while excluding him and the Space Ghost Coast to Coast crew. In case you were wondering why there was zero overlap after Moltar was dropped from the block.

[Daikun]

[Dr. Insomniac]

Maybe it's because the last few years blew the lid and turned "Toonami originals" into an instant turn-off, but it's simultaneously surprising and expected that I haven't seen much hype for this. I see Toonzone's hyped, but they're Toonzone. They'd get hyped at a brick wall that said "Toonami" on it. While most anime fans I've seen are more invested in the new Khara Gundam thing or Solo Leveling or whatever. Didn't help I heard people who saw an early screening of the first episode at NYCC say the premiere was too rocky and infodump-heavy.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Really? As someone who was there and saw the first episode at the NYCC panel, I didn't think it was particularly exposition-heavy. All of the exposition comes in like the first 5 minutes. After that most of the episode is devoted to two elaborate action/chase scenes. The reception I overheard from folks who saw it after both NYCC and ALA panels was pretty enthusiastic. From what I've seen around, I think people are generally looking forward to it. I was at a local anime convention in Minnesota this weekend, Anime Detour, and encountered folks who brought it up as one of the shows they were most looking forward to in the Spring. And on sites like MAL and AniList it's the 2nd most logged shows on people's "plan-to-watch" lists after Fire Force season 3. So it certainly seems to be on a lot of folks' radars.

I wrote about my thoughts on both the NYCC and ALA panels for the show if you want to read some early thoughts/impressions of it.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I don't know, but it's what I heard from other people regarding the premiere. I haven't seen it yet, so maybe they're wrong. And I'm trying not to let my hostility to modern Toonami influence my take on the show itself (the rest of the block, I'm still jaded on), since it not only has Watanabe but Stahelski who I really like on board (I fucking hope those rumors that he's directing MCU Blade are true). I'd like for it to be a critical and fan favorite and a sign that a much-needed course correction is happening for Toonami.

But it's just the anime circles I see and interact with are talking about different shows at the moment (and I know, my POV is not everyone else's so I can't objectively speak for the anime fandom at large, but it's still something I've noticed) and don't necessarily correlate with what's big on MAL. I occasionally look through old anime seasons there for fun and see series like Classroom of the Elite top the chart or sit right next to 1st place, and I don't know anybody who likes that show. I gave it a few episodes and thought "...why is this popular?" Same with how Fire Force season 3 is the most logged show on next season on MAL and AniList. Most people I know who gave the series a shot dropped it by season 1. At least with Solo Leveling, a show I really dislike and feel out of step on, I understand why that's big because the fans want to see well-animated fights.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Watched the first episode. The show opening up with talking about a corrupt pharmaceutical conspiracy that will destroy humanity while footage of a dreidel spinning played had very... confusing and unfortunate implications. I'm sure it means something else entirely, and I've talked to other people about it, but what do they mean by that? Rest of the show felt more like Suicide Squad than Cowboy Bebop. Fight scenes were all right, but the plot and symbolism were very messy in ways that distracted from the action.

[Daikun]

Watched the first episode. The show opening up with talking about a corrupt pharmaceutical conspiracy that will destroy humanity while footage of a dreidel spinning played had very... confusing and unfortunate implications. I'm sure it means something else entirely, and I've talked to other people about it, but what do they mean by that?

LumRanmaYasha actually reviewed the first five episodes on the Manga Mavericks website, and they provide their own interpretation on the dreidel scene:

The show has a lot of ambiguous but thematically loaded symbolism and metaphor that seems to lean into these readings, perhaps most notably the imagery of the spinning dreidel that topples over in the intro. First of all, I want to throw out any worries that the dreidel is linking the global health crisis in Lazarus to a Jewish conspiracy or something, that is an incredibly shallow and surface-level assumption. I can assure you it's unsubstantiated by the rest of the show, particularly since Dr. Skinner is not himself Jewish, so the metaphor of playing dreidel should be understood and interpreted just in its own context. From what I understand, playing dreidel is a gambling game where you pool wagers into a pot and how much you win from it depends on what Hebrew letter shows up face-front after you spin the dreidel and it topples – "nun;" the player gets nothing from the pot, "gimmel;" the player takes everything in the pot, "hay;" the player gets half, and "shin;" the player adds to the pot. Based on the intro, I believe the letter that falls face-front at the end is "nun." Assuming the person spinning the dreidel is Dr. Skinner, the idea could be that making Hapna was a gamble he played with humanity, and there was nothing he gained from it. If it's humanity who spun the dreidel by taking Hapna, then perhaps they got nothing from playing it. I do think it's notable that Skinner is the one who sees the symbol face-front on the dreidel, but from the viewer's POV we see the "shin" on the side. "Shin," in context of the game, is contributing to building the wealth in the pot – and in a broader sense the idea of everybody adding and contributing to a greater reward, which could be what Skinner wants from humanity and what the Lazarus team represents. "Shin," as in the Japanese word, could have several meanings from "new," "true," "God," "heart," and/or "mind," perhaps referencing the series' themes of exploring rebirth, the truth, religious existentialism, and the ways people feel and think.

It is also worth noting that it is commonly believed that the Hebrew letters on the four sides of the dreidel are initials representing the phrase "nes gadol haya sham," or "a great miracle happened there." The spinning dreidel could represent Hapna being seen as a miracle for humanity, and it falling could represent the end of that miracle. That the viewers see "sham" on the side could also have the literal English meaning of the word as "false," referring to Hapna as a false hope for humanity's good. It may be worth further considering that playing dreidel is said to have originated from Hebrews hiding their study of the Torah from their oppressors under the pretense of a game, so in that context the hide-and-seek game Skinner has proposed to the world to find him before the time limit runs out might also be a pretense for his own study to see how humanity will react to this crisis. There are a lot of different interpretations of what the dreidel could mean that depend on how deep the metaphor goes, my takes themselves are fairly surface-level from just doing a bit of research. Even so, it's abundantly clear that Watanabe is trying to say something about Dr. Skinner or humanity playing god and gambling on lives and the yearning to find a deeper meaning and truth in the world, and I'm really curious as to what Watanabe means by his choice of visual metaphors and symbols and where he plans to take these ideas.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Okay, cool. Concern relieved.

[Daikun]

Um... Okay?

[Dr. Insomniac]

Okay, watched the first 3 episodes of Lazarus, and eh...

My main problem, for a show where the premise is that tons of people will die in under 30 days if they don't find the doctor who made the poison painkillers, it's very leisurely so far, 3 episodes into a 1-cour run. There's no intensity that you'd expect from the synopsis. Like in the last episode where they're eating baklava and playing basketball (they also didn't think the audience knew what baklava was and had to explain it?), it didn't feel like the stakes mattered. I wasn't exactly expecting 24 or anything, but the show doesn't do enough to tackle the gravity of the situation. Another example in the last episode where I thought shit was gonna go down but then it turned out to be loan sharks and cops having a big misunderstanding over a completely different guy. I guess you can argue it's a story about the banality of the apocalypse, that most people will just turn a blind eye or do something else with their time in the face of societal collapse, but that doesn't make for gripping storytelling. Because I remember Terror in Resonance having a very tight, crisp early set of episodes, and that felt more exciting to watch than this.

Still not sure why they need a Suicide Squad to do this when this was public news in the first episode, so you'd think every country would send all their feds out to scour the world for Dr. Skinner instead of relying on ex-cons. This isn't really a black ops mission if it's in the entire world's best interests to grab him. Maybe you can argue it's so a more selfish government doesn't get him first and withholds the cure for themselves, but you can easily say that for the backers behind the not Suicide Squad over here if they're using prison labor? And you can't even rationalize Dr. Skinner being sympathetic in the long run, because people who need painkillers aren't inherently bad? You can't really be in the right or even close to it by killing everybody whose biggest crime is wanting an alternative to aspirin? Because "humanity is rotting the world, so I must make a super-fentanyl and disguise it as a healthy drug to destroy humanity" comes off more like a Neil Breen scheme than anything resembling sane intentions.

And what sucks is I want to like this show. It has artists I respect working on the details, and there are bits I enjoy. But unless it suddenly gets really good later on, I'm feeling a similar disappointment to what I felt from the FLCL sequels.

[Daikun]

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War joins Toonami on May 17.