Toonami

[Avaitor]

Apparently it's actually not airing on Toonami after all?

[Dr. Insomniac]

What is AXS TV? According to what I can find, it's some Mark Cuban joint in Canada that mostly airs music shows?

I did always think it was weird how in recent years where anime's more normalized than ever, none of that trickled down to cable or network TV outside of Toonami. And sure, cable's been more out of step than ever with what modern culture wants, but you'd have thought someone would get bored and license a casual-friendly anime movie like a Shinkai, Hosoda, or Miyazaki thing to fill airtime. And I suppose that confusion is finally being settled.

Wonder how DeMarco feels about all this. He always seemed either really dismissive or petty regarding other anime blocks, even blocks with zero overlap with Toonami's audience. Saw that recent interview from him where he was still mad at Toonzai even when that block's been dead for over a decade.



Not to mention his namesearching habit still hasn't died down.

[Avaitor]

It is weird that no one's really tried to compete with Toonami in recent years, especially with the ever-increasing anime boom. In fact, I've suspected that the reason Zaslav hasn't cut their finances for producing anime is his attempt to cash in on that market, even though basically none of their co-productions have yet to blow up.

[Daikun]

It is weird that no one's really tried to compete with Toonami in recent years, especially with the ever-increasing anime boom.

There were several attempts, but they all failed, either due to being on a channel that's barely available (Chiller), low viewership due to being mainly old reruns from other networks (Vortexx), or the higher-ups just stopped caring (Syfy). No one even bothers anymore since the market has largely moved to streaming nowadays, but Toonami keeps chugging along.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I can't see a direct rival to Toonami ever working since what the hell is Toonami really competing with? Late-night infomercials and reruns of old sitcoms and movies everyone's already watched? The only reason they're surviving is because they're grandfathered in and not out of any merit on their part. But what I'm curious is about is the lack of any anime movies rerunning, since Tubi has plenty of them like Ghost in the Shell, In This Corner of the World, Maquia, Penguin Highway. And nothing I've seen from GKIDS or Discotek implies they're difficult about licensing their film acquisitions to others. We're at the point where cable networks are just airing whatever without reason, saw E! once do a Downton Abbey marathon, so what's really stopping us from seeing a channel like AMC get the rights to rerun Wolf Children or A Silent Voice? AMC owns Sentai Filmworks, so there's nothing in the way of them airing something like 5 Centimeters Per Second on a lazy Sunday. Or at least, for some random channel to rerun one of the old Pokemon movies? Because a bunch of them are on Hoopla, so if the rights owner is willing to give them to public libraries, it shouldn't be hard to entice a TV channel thanks to the brand recognition.

And for Zaslav, I have no idea. Because Max barely has any anime beyond co-productions. Nothing compared to Hulu or Netflix.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Another ship sinks, revealed on the same week DeMarco's LOTR movie came out to rotten reviews.

[Daxdiv]

RIP to the nostalgia block. I'm guessing none of the shows were able to complete their run. Wasn't expecting Naruto to reach the end, but I at least was expecting DBZ Kai to at least finish at Freeza.

[Daikun]

RIP to the nostalgia block. I'm guessing none of the shows were able to complete their run. Wasn't expecting Naruto to reach the end, but I at least was expecting DBZ Kai to at least finish at Freeza.

The first season of Sailor Moon was able to finish. It's a shame we won't be able to see the rest.
It'd be nice if they at least added the later seasons to Saturdays now that Rewind is cancelled.

[Rynnec]

Shame about Rewind. I was really hoping they'd start airing Trigun in January since the end of that run would concede with the release of the final Trigun Maximum Deluxe volume. Oh well.


Also not sure what I did, but apparently DeMarco's blocked me on Twitter for some reason.

Spoiler

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[Daikun]

Eh, he's deleting all his social media in January anyway, so it's not like it matters.

[Dr. Insomniac]

He'll be back. This is hardly the first time he acted melodramatic and said he'll quit social media only to return a month later. He's too much of a chronic namesearcher to ever leave for good. Frankly, I don't understand why anybody takes him at his word anymore after years of glazing Uzumaki and treating it like it was his baby only to feign innocence and insist he had no clue once people complained.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Being real here for a moment, does Toonami even have much of a purpose anymore? Don't get me wrong, I will always have deep rooted nostalgia for the original weekday afternoon block that introduced so many kids of my generation to anime as well as being the go-to place to catch re-runs of DCAU shows. It was great for exposing a Western audience to shows they might otherwise not check out, and undeniably much of what I watched on Toonami has had a lasting influence on much of what I love to this day. That said, when it initially came back it was an exciting enough prospect, but we're now at the point several years later where I can confidently say that less people consume media on cable than streaming. More people will be exposed to shows on Netflix, Crunchyroll, or even some of the B-list services than on a late-night TV block that probably gets most of it's views from adults who grew up with the block in the first place.

I'm not saying that it doesn't have some level of dedicated viewers that are exposed to shows on that block, but how many people are seriously going to stay up until 2AM or beyond to watch re-runs of an anime that is easily accessible to stream at any time that they want, dub or sub?

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, it's been something I've pondered over for a while. What's the point of Toonami in 2025 and beyond, besides to flatter the habitual and nostalgic? If I wanted to watch some anime, no matter if it's dubbed or subtitled, I have other avenues than waiting until midnight once a week. I think I already mentioned that anecdote from the Dr. Stone dub cast saying that while they thought it was cool in a fanboy sense that their show was on Toonami, a block they used to watch as kids, nobody they knew was awake when it aired. Perhaps there are some viewers who are watching Mashle for the first time on Toonami, similar to how my introduction to DBZ was through watching unsubbed raws on the International Channel in the late 90s, but I assume it's a significantly tinier slice of the pie than it used to be. Arguably, thanks to streaming and cordcutting, Toonami is less relevant to viewers now than it was in the middle of 2008 when it first died. At least that had the decency to air when most kids and teenagers, the target audience for most of Toonami's shows, would be awake.

And it's not like the guys running Toonami or the WB executives don't know, since they've been pushing for originals recently just so the block has something that's their own as opposed to only acquisitions viewers can find elsewhere. The problem is most of those original shows are either critical and/or commercial failures, while the producer behind them goes into bizarrely childish tangents in order to defend his own work (like my earlier post showing him searching his own name to find criticism to yell at, and then comparing his Suicide Squad anime to Evangelion). Fully expecting him to become the anime equivalent to Uwe Boll and challenge dissenters to boxing matches. And the problem isn't even that they're co-productions, since there have been plenty of shows that have had a fusion of American/Japanese funding and supervision like Afro Samurai, last year's Scott Pilgrim, and whenever I watch an anime and see English names alongside Japanese names in the producer credits.

I'm also sure I said this elsewhere, but besides the awful scheduling (kinda disappointed that Toonami Rewind failed because that felt like a step to bringing the block back to its original purpose as opposed to just being a glorified graveyard slot), the other big problem Toonami's never addressed is it's a million times easier to access tons of anime than it was back in 2004. Back in the early 2000s, it was either watch the show on TV, pay $20 for 3 episodes of show on DVD, or hope your kid brain knew how to torrent. So of course anime fans were gonna pick the cheapest, safest option out of the 3. But now, streaming, whether through legal or illegal means, exists and turned that upside down, and simulcasts/simuldubs have really changed the way anime's brought here, but Toonami hasn't adapted to any of that and still acts as if the only other way to watch a show like Zom 100 or Mashle is to go to a Suncoast store and spend almost $100 on DVDs. And so they become the far less convenient option to watch anime.

And over time, I haven't bought the excuse that Toonami needs to be late night because they have to reserve primetime for reruns of Fox shows in order to increase ratings. Because ratings for CN in general are in the toilet no matter what airs. A week ago, I saw AS fans celebrate a show getting 100,000 ratings, a fraction of what the channel used to get back in the day. Besides, it's AS. They've made plenty of niche yet confusingly star-studded shows that no normal person would watch. Why is anime the point where they suddenly decide to give a shit about ratings at the expense of channel variety?

[Rynnec]

I've probably said this before, but the only reason I even catch Toonami these days is because I'm up during those hours anyway, and even then the schedule is hit or miss at the best of times.

It doesn't help that Toonami hardly airs anything that anime fans already haven't heard of anyway, or even air shows that would be suited to the timeslot. They had the right idea airing more seinen shows like Lycoris Recoil and Zom 100 at the start of the year, since that audience is more likely to be awake, but that quickly fizzled out into getting more seasons of shounen shows. Getting Demon Slayer in particular is a double edged sword because not only is the next season just a long training arc, everything after that will be in the form of movies that could take years to air on TV, if at all, let alone Toonami.

Adult Swim's sheer incompetence at handling movies over the years doesn't help. I can't for the life of me understand why they can't air movies multiple times in multiple slots like every other network (including other Turner networks) in existence. Are fucking Fox reruns really more important? And they had the gall to act surprised when the second month of movies failed.

[Dr. Insomniac]

It's hard to argue in their favor, since Max has plenty of animated movies. And plenty of them would fit quite well on Toonami. Like what are the logistics in Warner being able to license the streaming rights for these films, but not the TV rights? Because the cynic in me thinks there is no issue and it is just incompetent TV scheduling at play.

I also noticed they're putting Naruto back on the Saturday schedule now that rewind's a bust, and okay? Like I said earlier, why not just grab the rights to some 2-cour show they used to air instead of a 200+ episode series that everyone knows the block won't have 4 years of patience to air all of? Besides, who's actually gonna be watching Naruto at 2:30 AM? And willing to stay the course for an episode a week instead of just going somewhere else to get their fix?