Toonami

[Daikun]

There will be a Lazarus screening at NYCC. It also has a synopsis:

Spoiler

The year is 2052 an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity prevails across the globe. The reason for this: mankind has been freed from sickness and pain. Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Skinner has developed a miracle cure-all drug with no apparent drawbacks called Hapuna. Three years later, the world has moved on. But Dr. Skinner has returned this time, as a harbinger of doom. Skinner announces that Hapuna has a short half-life. Everyone who has taken it will die approximately three years later. Death is coming for this sinful world and coming soon. As a response to this threat, a special task force of 5 agents is gathered from across the world to save humanity from Skinner's plan. This group is called 'Lazarus.' Can they find Skinner and develop a vaccine before time runs out?

[close]

Also, Production I.G. won't be involved, so I have a slim chance of hope that they can't fuck this up. (I've noticed that Adult Swim's better-received anime originals tend to keep them out of the picture.)

[Dr. Insomniac]

I'd love to put the cynicism down and be hopeful for this, but it's hard. I also expected that Blade Runner show to be good since it had Watanabe as the creative director, but not only was that disappointingly mid, but coming out at the same time as Arcane highlighted all of its shortcomings by comparison.

Incidentally, it's ironic that a big trainwreck of a Toonami original came out on the same season as Dandadan, a show that I thought captured all the thematic aspects of a FLCL successor better than the actual FLCL sequels. That show's fun, and not just that, but GKIDS is licensing it out to almost every single streamer so it's easy to legally watch no matter what you're paying for. It all illustrates how much Toonami's slipped compared to its competitors where all it can really hope for is a store-brand version of a better thing you can find elsewhere.

[Avaitor]

Blue Exorcist (season 1 rebroadcast or one of the newer seasons?) airs on the second, and Mashle on the 9th.

I wasn't really keeping up with Toonami when Blue Exorcist first aired and I don't know anything about Mashle, but at this point I'm willing to give both a shot, no questions asked. Better more shonen slop than more half-assed originals.

Edit: looks like it's just S1 of Blue Exorcist for now. Weird to put it at a near-prime slot for a decade-old repeat.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I guess they want to hype up the recent Blue Exorcist season when they air it, though I'd say it's a lost cause when the first season was 13 years ago, and the second was 7. They know when the current season's over, they're gonna have to wait until maybe 2030 for the next one, right? I guess I should be impressed for any fans that they've waited this long for content, but to what end?

Personally, I never saw the appeal. It felt too derivative of other shonen with nothing else to show for it, and the episodes I saw were kinda boring. Same with Mashle, though I think the opening theme is pretty good.

On another note, I got bored and watched a little of that NYCC Daima panel yesterday, and it's crazy how much it pandered to old Toonami/ASA nostalgia by making a big deal about Stephanie Nadolny being back, and going "Hey, we've got the voice of Alphonse Elric and Senku Ishigami as our co-lead!", yet Toonami itself really had no presence there at all. And this happening in the light of Uzumaki being a bust, it all felt like a huge symbolic defeat for the brand by losing Dragonball around the same time their passion project flopped. Leaves you wondering just what Toonami's MO is at the moment besides "Not die". Because 20 years ago, the mission was easy to explain: Introduce a bunch of formative shonen anime to the 8-13 demographic who just finished school and come home in the hopes of finding something cool on CN. But that hasn't been the agenda for the block in quite some time, and as time goes on and more people are legally watching anime through Crunchyroll, Netflix, Hulu, etc, you're left to wonder what the point is besides giving the older Toonami/ASA fans who haven't left yet a weekly routine.

[Rynnec]

Of all the shows they could rerun, they fucking chose Blue Goddamn Exorcist?   

Can't say I'm all that excited for Mashle either.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Anyway, he did a Q&A on Threads. The usual stuff. His insistence that the Rick and Morty anime was a success, that shows with Japanese animation count as anime, it's someone else's fault that Toonami Rewind is skipping Naruto episodes, and still being bitter at Toonzai's existence even though that ended 12 years ago.

Of all the shows they could rerun, they fucking chose Blue Goddamn Exorcist?   

The awkward part is we're reaching the point where Blue Exorcist's series premiere in Japan (2011) will be chronologically closer to Toonami's first airing (1997) than today (2024). We're not there yet for anybody who fears feeling old, but it's happening soon.

[Foggle]

I'd love to put the cynicism down and be hopeful for this, but it's hard. I also expected that Blade Runner show to be good since it had Watanabe as the creative director, but not only was that disappointingly mid, but coming out at the same time as Arcane highlighted all of its shortcomings by comparison.

Didn't it end up that he actually had more or less nothing to do with the Blade Runner series and Toonami was just promoting it like that to try drawing in more viewers? From what I can tell, "Creative Director" in Japanese productions often means "famous Executive Producer who contributed some ideas." I'm sure Demarco and co. already knew that, though, and were using it to take advantage of westerners who didn't. I think this one is an actual Watanabe series, and much more personal for him since Keiko Nobumoto was working on it before her passing (RIP). Granted, it's hard to get excited about any Toonami production, but I desperately want Lazarus to be good considering the concept and creative team behind it, so I'll be huffing plenty of copium until it finally airs.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I hope so, but the trailer looks... fine. Just fine.

[Foggle]

Well, the trailer for Uzumaki looked great, so who can say? I'll never pretend to understand what goes through a Toonami producer's head...

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, like I don't get why they're rerunning Blue Exorcist. Even if it's meant to hype the new season, that's still gonna take 6 months to rerun just season 1, and that'll be more than enough time for anyone who cares to watch the show elsewhere instead of watching it air on Toonami.

[Avaitor]

Space Dandy is the only genuinely great Toonami original, so maybe Lazarus will do the trick, but even the "best" stuff from this era hasn't been much to write home about. I don't think the back half of Ninja Kamui is as bad as others said, but it did itself no favors with its CG and it's a credit to Ito's writing above all else that Uzumaki remained watchable even with its animation dip (to be fair, I haven't seen the last episode yet which supposedly brings the original director back). If I had to pick a third series, Shenmue is probably as good as an adaptation of such a notoriously tedious series that we can get.

Personally, I believe the theory that the originals we get are projects no one in Japan wants to fund.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Did anybody here watch Carole & Tuesday? Because that was the last Watanabe and Nobumoto collab, and from what I remember, it was fine. I had a decent enough time watching it, but it didn't impress me the way Bebop or Champloo did.

[Foggle]

I adored Carole & Tuesday! Which is apparently a controversial opinion, but I thought it was really good and didn't understand most of the criticisms. Not quite on the level of Cowboy Bebop or Space Dandy, but those are mythical-level for me. Is it no longer a hot take to call Space Dandy a masterpiece? Because it genuinely might be my favorite anime of all time. Love Champloo too, but gotta revisit/finish it. Watanabe has never missed from my experience with his work, though I wasn't keen on the last third of Terror in Resonance.

[Avaitor]

I still haven't seen Carole & Tuesday, but I really should get around to it. Kids in the Slope is probably my favorite Watanabe after Bebop, so him returning to a smaller, more humanist scale should be right up my alley.

[Dr. Insomniac]

You know Toonami's brand has lost value when the Fate producers are announcing Unlimited Blade Works will air on TV next year, and they just describe it as a "cable TV broadcast" as if there are alternative avenues for anime on TV in the 2020s. Maybe an AMC exec got bored?