Toonami's just about dead when you think about it.

ZZenigundam

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Toonami will never return to its glory years of the Moltar and Tom 1 days. It was meant to be a five or six airing per week type block. You will never see reruns of DB Super and DBZ Kai because of this. Our childhoods ended in the early 2000s at max, so let's just finally let go.

It's pretty sad because they could just have it consume Adult Swim weeknights, but they'll never do that. Yeah this is bad, coming from someone who grew up in the glory days of Cartoon Network (1995-01), yeah Boomerang won't even play the Hanna Barbera classics I grew up on anymore, they'd rather play Fosters and Tom and Jerry Tales.

Wow RIP, man, I don't even know what to say anymore. :french2:
 

sessava

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The weird thing about it is that, honestly, I think anime is more popular in the west now than it has ever been. I see people talking about the more popular anime all the time, and shows like One Punch Man, Attack on Titan, etc, continuously find their way into mainstream appeal. A large chunk of western anime fans grew up watching Toonami and Adult Swim anime, and yet Cartoon Network regulates their anime into a little block on Saturday nights.

Is this just a thing where the type of audience that watches anime, typically millenials, do not use traditional forms of media and thus cable companies do not try and solely target their demographic?

I'd love to see Japanese companies take an actual interest in western audiences and trying to push anime in our countries a lot harder. There are several large Japanese corporations that already have their hand in western media - why not take a stab at a mainstream English anime channel that targets people of all ages? Maybe show subbed anime at night time rather than dubbed.

I hardly watch TV these days. I tune into Toonami once in a blue moon to check things out. It mostly makes me sad that the new generations growing up won't have access to the sort of stuff that I did when I was their age. Anime is going through a golden age of popularity right now, but if the generation growing up now has basically zero anime airing on their television, will that popularity last at all? Most people I know that don't watch anime when they are young turn into the sort of people who just hate anime and never want to even give it a chance as an adult.
 

Light Lucario

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It really isn't. Just because the block is different from its golden age doesn't mean that the block is dead. It had to change due to being on Adult Swim and they wouldn't have been interested in letting the block run for more than one day a week. And it couldn't go back to Cartoon Network proper because they haven't been interested in blocks for ages and most of the people familiar with Toonami would be outside of their target demographic.

The television landscape has changed drastically since Toonami originally ended and the way fans watch anime series is pretty different as well. More and more people watch shows via streaming sites nowadays. What worked for the original Toonami back in the day may not work for the current Toonami block because of those key differences. Not to mention I don't think it would be possible for them to air multiple new episodes within five or six days considering how expensive that would be for their budget.

They've already produced the fifth season of Samurai Jack, they have new seasons of FLCL on the way and I think DeMarco mentioned that they have plans in motion for the next few years. Clearly, the block is not doing that poorly for itself. It's one thing to not care for the block or the direction its going in. That's fine, but telling other people that they should let it go does seem a bit much. It kind of reminds me of people who hate a show so much that they demand that it ends. Being upset at a show can be understandable, but placing your feelings above everyone else's by saying it should be over, or in this case that other people should let the block go because of your opinion on it, doesn't sit right with me.
 

3ngag3

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Please do not engage this user. He is only posting to troll and invoke flame bait. Just report and ignore. Thank you.
 

ZZenigundam

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For some reason this thread came back to me and I, consequently, came up with a plan to fix Toonami.

First of all, like I said, it has to be on every weeknight, so that they can rerun series instead of dumping them after one run just to be cheap or just plain dumping them like they did with Lupin and One Piece and almost all the shows that were on when Tom 4 was around, even though those mostly sucked and were for babies. Yeah so that has to happen basically, nobody wants to watch most of those comedies. Adult Swim's had like three good comedies in its entire existence.

Secondly, how about bringing in some classics like X-Men (Fox Kids one) or the original Transformers, that would be sick. Ya know most of this new stuff kinda sucks, you need a classic in there.

Thirdly, where was I going with this, yeah, baby steps at first. Are these guys gonna stop letting the comedy people at Adult Swim bully them already? Take control and start a Toonami Uprising, but don't do anything illegal. I'm serious, they could actually be more assertive and get their demands met I'm sure, it happens all the time at jobs.
 

Golden Geek

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Yeah so that has to happen basically, nobody wants to watch most of those comedies. Adult Swim's had like three good comedies in its entire existence.

I'm going to hit you with a solid fact here: those comedies do much better than Toonami would being on every single night, and are significantly less expensive than running a back catalog of anime every single night. Look at the ratings some time.
 

PicardMan

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Toonami on weeknights couldn't work because Rick and Morty, Family Guy, whatever do way better, but being confined to just Saturdays does not make it dead. It's been running Saturday only for well over a decade, hardly "dying." There's no way Disney would allow Marvel cartoons on Toonami and superhero cartoons are unlikely. I know Toonami can't be what everybody wants it to be, but it's not dying because it doesn't please every fan. Remember all the fans hating whenever a non-anime like Beware the Batman aired on Toonami? FLCL is a sign that Toonami is planning big things.
 

wonderfly

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Toonami will never return to its glory years of the Moltar and Tom 1 days. It was meant to be a five or six airing per week type block. You will never see reruns of DB Super and DBZ Kai because of this. Our childhoods ended in the early 2000s at max, so let's just finally let go.

It's pretty sad because they could just have it consume Adult Swim weeknights, but they'll never do that. Yeah this is bad, coming from someone who grew up in the glory days of Cartoon Network (1995-01), yeah Boomerang won't even play the Hanna Barbera classics I grew up on anymore, they'd rather play Fosters and Tom and Jerry Tales.

Wow RIP, man, I don't even know what to say anymore. :french2:

I enjoy reading the thoughts from returning forum members who haven't been on Toonzone in years.

I got to looking: I notice you joined in 2006, and resurfaced in 2017. That's around 11 years you were away.

And I find it interesting, even back in 2006, you were among those asking for the return of weekday Toonami. At least you're consistent. :)

As an old school Toonami fan, I can agree with your sentiment. But Toonami's not dead. I would argue that cable is dead (or quickly dying) but many channels (like Cartoon Network) will probably migrate to an "all online" format, eventually...though that may be years away. And it won't be the same as it was back in the Toonami "Golden Age"...but still, Jason DeMarco and company apparently have plans for years to come, and Adult Swim seems more supportive of Toonami than they were back in, say, 2015, when they chopped the block down to 3 hours.

So Toonami's not dead, but with so much anime available (by way of Netflix,Crunchyroll, etc), perhaps the real debate is (if I can point you two a couple of other threads) whether or not Toonami has been a success since returning in 2012 (when compared to it's success in the early 00's)...or to phrase it another way, whether or not Toonami has lost it's relevancy.

That's the real debate. It's the age old question of "Are things better or worse now, than they were 10 to 20 years ago?" And the answer: It depends on how you look at things. Nostalgia always says "It was better back then", but nostalgia can be fickle.
 

PicardMan

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Admittedly, Toonami is less convenient than those Funimation Now streams, but it has its purpose. With all the trashy ecchi anime, Toonami works well as a curated filter to find (mostly) quality shows. Outside of Toonami, I'd only check out an anime if it has very good word of mouth. Because of how Viz works, it's the only place to see most Viz dubs (who wants to wait to see HunterXHunter and JoJo stream in 2025?). Nowadays, casuals have abandoned dub waiting because subs are quickly available and they want to know what's happening now. If JoJo and Hunter had their dubs streamed, there would be no way I'd be up so late. So thank Viz for not streaming dubs until 8-9years after a show's lost popularity for keeping Toonami viable.
 

Light Lucario

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For some reason this thread came back to me and I, consequently, came up with a plan to fix Toonami.

First of all, like I said, it has to be on every weeknight, so that they can rerun series instead of dumping them after one run just to be cheap or just plain dumping them like they did with Lupin and One Piece and almost all the shows that were on when Tom 4 was around, even though those mostly sucked and were for babies. Yeah so that has to happen basically, nobody wants to watch most of those comedies. Adult Swim's had like three good comedies in its entire existence.

They don't dump a series after its done because they're cheap. It's because they can't afford to keep shows on the lineup after they're done airing new episodes. It's the same reason why they can't have Toonami on every night. It would be more expensive than Adult Swim would consider worthwhile. Besides that, Adult Swim would rather air those comedy series every night because they would have a better chance at appealing to casual audiences than Toonami does. Regardless of how you feel about the quality of their comedy series, they still bring in viewers all the time and I don't think that Toonami airing reruns every night would attract the same or greater amount of people.

ZZenigundam said:
Secondly, how about bringing in some classics like X-Men (Fox Kids one) or the original Transformers, that would be sick. Ya know most of this new stuff kinda sucks, you need a classic in there.

That's also really not possible, especially for X-Men. I doubt that Disney would want one of their Marvel animated series airing on a block aimed at adults, even if they aren't doing much with the X-Men characters compared to a lot of other Marvel characters. I don't know who owns the original Transformers series, but I doubt that they'd be interested in it for the same reason. While you may not like the new series Toonami has, they need to put more focus on getting more recent series instead of trying to get old shows. The block has to move forward, not just focus on what fans of the original block used to watch or wanted to see back in the day.

ZZenigundam said:
Thirdly, where was I going with this, yeah, baby steps at first. Are these guys gonna stop letting the comedy people at Adult Swim bully them already? Take control and start a Toonami Uprising, but don't do anything illegal. I'm serious, they could actually be more assertive and get their demands met I'm sure, it happens all the time at jobs.

Are you suggesting that the people behind Toonami be more assertive against their higher ups at Adult Swim? If you are, then that really wouldn't be a good idea. They could try to do that, but then they'd just be replaced or worse cause the block to be cancelled. They aren't being paid for their work on Toonami, so I don't think starting an "uprising" would be in their best interest. Besides that, there's no evidence that they're being bullied by people at Adult Swim. Just because you're upset that Adult Swim airs the comedy series more often doesn't really mean that the people at Toonami are being bullied or aren't getting their demands met.

If anything, their relationship with Adult Swim seems to be pretty positive, at least based on how much we can see it. Even with the block lost I think the 11PM a couple of years ago, DeMarco said that the people at Adult Swim reassured him that Toonami wasn't in any danger of being cancelled and they wanted them to stick around. Considering that the block now starts at 10:30PM, I don't think that they were lying about that. Based on how much Toonami has been able to accomplish since it was brought back, claiming that their demands haven't been met is also pretty questionable. You may not like the block as it is and that's fine, but I don't think that Toonami needs to be "fixed", or at least that these ideas aren't going to help the block in the long run.

Toonami on weeknights couldn't work because Rick and Morty, Family Guy, whatever do way better, but being confined to just Saturdays does not make it dead. It's been running Saturday only for well over a decade, hardly "dying." There's no way Disney would allow Marvel cartoons on Toonami and superhero cartoons are unlikely. I know Toonami can't be what everybody wants it to be, but it's not dying because it doesn't please every fan. Remember all the fans hating whenever a non-anime like Beware the Batman aired on Toonami? FLCL is a sign that Toonami is planning big things.

I don't remember fans being upset over shows like Beware the Batman airing on Toonami. I think more people here were just surprised, but there might have been more backlash on other sites.

So Toonami's not dead, but with so much anime available (by way of Netflix,Crunchyroll, etc), perhaps the real debate is (if I can point you two a couple of other threads) whether or not Toonami has been a success since returning in 2012 (when compared to it's success in the early 00's)...or to phrase it another way, whether or not Toonami has lost it's relevancy.

That's the real debate. It's the age old question of "Are things better or worse now, than they were 10 to 20 years ago?" And the answer: It depends on how you look at things. Nostalgia always says "It was better back then", but nostalgia can be fickle.

I would say that Toonami has been a success since it was revived. It started out as just a small two hour block, but now it goes from 10:30PM until 4AM. They've co-produced new seasons of Samurai Jack and FLCL and they've aired some of Funimation's simuldubs, such as with Attack on Titan season two and currently Black Clover. That sounds like it is a success to me.

Whether or not Toonami has lost its relevancy is a more interesting question to me. I think it still works as a way to introduce some anime titles to casual fans or people within the general audience who aren't that interested in anime. While stuff like Funimation Now and Crunchyroll are used pretty frequently among anime fans, I don't know how many casual people would use them to check out a series. They might for some of the really popular/well received shows, but that still might not apply for everyone, especially when they may not want to watch subs or pay the extra fee to watch the simuldubs. Plus, even with how commonplace it is to watch shows via streaming sites these days, TV exposure is still really good and can potentially attract more of an audience than just being legally available online, so I think that Toonam still has purpose even in this day and age. It's different than the original block and I'm not sure how many people would be first exposed to anime via the current Toonami compared to the original one, but it still has relevancy.
 

PicardMan

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I don't remember fans being upset over shows like Beware the Batman airing on Toonami. I think more people here were just surprised, but there might have been more backlash on other sites.

Here there's rarely a poopstorm over shows. Even in cases where somebody dislikes a show, Toonzone seems polite about it and rarely attacks the fans or detractors of a show (excepting a few overzelous JoJo fans who seem to have quited down. That's good.) Other forums are much more savage places. The old Adult Swim boards, where I used to go before it died, is where the backlash happened, and it was ugly. Those boards were an example of how unpleasable and fickle jerks some Toonami fans are.

Another important thing to realize. Funimation only has 300,000 subscribers. That means more people are watching the Black Clover dub on Toonami than there, even after it got booted to near the end of the block. It's almost guaranteed that My Hero Academia will also do this. Of course, we probably won't have as many people watching the dub on Toonami as on Yahoo View, Hulu, and the pirate sites, where the majority of fans probably watch the dub.
 

PicardMan

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I'm pretty sure that we have a hard and fast no anime older than Bebop rule (by American or Japanese release date?). Old cartoons tend to look old, as you would guess, and would do quite bad in the ratings (remember how Outlaw Star reruns bombed?). We could use a few 2000s era shows, but that seems unlikely. Yes, even though I don't think Toonami is close to death (the 2008 Naruto power hour followed by Ben 10 and Samurai Jack reruns was the last legs lineup), the lack of variety is a significant problem, which is why I'm so excited for the "confusing" show Demarco promised (Pop Team Epic or other non-action anime?). I hope the confusing show is what replaces Kai, and we don't have eternal Kai reruns taking that slot.
 

LinusFan303

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Block's not dying. Having it one night a week works for the block , it fits with the less is more rule let's them plan things better and allows shorter series to last on the air a little longer. It concentrates viewers into one night instead of spreading them out. If people want anime every other day there are bunch of streaming sites that do that , even Adult Swim has a toonami stream on their site/app.

Adult Swim's Originals don't appeal to everyone but they appeal to someone and they are more than just Toonami. Not everybody likes everything on AS that's why they have different things to hopefully get different people.

I don't think AS is being mean to Toonami , they get pretty much a whole night (minus a few hours) and getting order series like My Hero Academia and FLCL etc. which probably aren't cheap. And again older series are available other ways now and they know it too which is why they probably aren't putting it on their block.
 

Nobodyman

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Maybe it's just me, but I never really watched reruns of anime back in the day anyway. And it's not that I never watched reruns, I watched reruns of Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Ed, Edd n' Eddy, etc. all the time when I was a kid. But, for me, anime was just a watch-it-once-and-you're-done (at least for a while) kind of deal. Perhaps because they generally were long-running stories and it would just feel weird to watch the whole thing over again or even watch episodes randomly.
 

jaylop97

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If Toonami ever aired every night I doubt it would last long given how expensive it would be and given ratings as a whole are falling it wouldn't be beneficial either. They are doing well with weekly programming and compared to other anime related programming it is still going strong with various titles.
 

ZZenigundam

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I would argue that cable is dead (or quickly dying) but many channels (like Cartoon Network) will probably migrate to an "all online" format, eventually...though that may be years away. And it won't be the same as it was back in the Toonami "Golden Age"...but still, Jason DeMarco and company apparently have plans for years to come, and Adult Swim seems more supportive of Toonami than they were back in, say, 2015, when they chopped the block down to 3 hours.

So Toonami's not dead, but with so much anime available (by way of Netflix,Crunchyroll, etc), perhaps the real debate is (if I can point you two a couple of other threads) whether or not Toonami has been a success since returning in 2012 (when compared to it's success in the early 00's)...or to phrase it another way, whether or not Toonami has lost it's relevancy.

That's the real debate. It's the age old question of "Are things better or worse now, than they were 10 to 20 years ago?" And the answer: It depends on how you look at things. Nostalgia always says "It was better back then", but nostalgia can be fickle.

Well I haven't really been gone, I mostly just lurk without posting, but yeah my gut tells me that you're right and that's where cable television is headed. Pretty soon we might only be able to reminisce about the old days (a la the 70s show The Way It Was).

Reading everybody's replies in here, just seems like nothing has changed in terms of why Toonami will never be on 5-6 days a week again. In Toonami's last years on weekdays, I had become disenchanted with the realization that so much of the anime was heavily edited and I was also just about to enter HS. It never dawned upon me before Yu Yu was taken off of AS and moved because almost all of Toonami's previous cartoons were tame and you wouldn't know they were edited for content if you'd never seen an uncut version, but even though I was really put off and aware of the Yu Yu, Kenshin, DB edits and stopped following it, I never wanted it to be banished to party night, canceled, and then revived later on late late party night. I always thought there was a beacon of hope that it could return to weekdays with less edited shows, especially when Naruto's (TV-PG!!) first couple of seasons were rerun on weekday CN.

But it looks like you and others are right and it's time to accept that streaming might kill off cable TV, which is a tough pill to swallow for a couch potato who grew up in front of the tube and liked to be able to see reruns of good cartoons and shows without them being canned or replaced so quickly. :donald:
 

wonderfly

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He's right, in this day and age of serialized storylines (even live action shows like "The Walking Dead", etc), the days of "weekday/weeknight reruns" are a thing of the past.

Nobodyman said something similar: Reruns were great for shows like Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girls, etc. For many anime (and for shows like Steven Universe), not so much. At least not with all the streaming services available.

ZZenigundam said:
I always thought there was a beacon of hope that it could return to weekdays with less edited shows, especially when Naruto's (TV-PG!!) first couple of seasons were rerun on weekday CN.

Well, you've got a point - Naruto started airing weekdays on Miguzi towards the end of that block's lifespan, blurring the line between what's a Toonami show and what's a Miguzi show. I think that was done because Miguzi was dying (and the "City" era was slowly drawing to a close - this was in early 2007), and they were running out of material or just wanted to shake things up a bit, for Miguzi.

Too bad, it seems like they could've hit upon an idea: Keep Toonami as the weekend party block doing premiere episodes, but eventually cycling reruns through the weekday afternoons on Miguzi. Instead of marketing them as separate blocks (for different age groups), maybe make them compliment one another. I dunno, just a random thought.
 

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