Toonami’s longest running anime of all time, Naruto Shippuden, has come to an end. The 500th and final episode aired on the Toonami broadcast for August 31, 2024. The popular ninja anime Naruto Shippuden is set several years after the original Naruto series, and focuses on Naruto’s quest to save his rival Sasuke from Orochimaru and other evil ninja from the Akatsuki. In recent months, the show has moved past the original 700 chapter Naruto manga. Novels depicting the future romances and careers of Naruto and his friends have been adapted, culminated in a final episode featuring Naruto’s wedding to longtime admirer Hinata Hyuga.
The history of Naruto’s run on American television runs nearly 20 years. Toonami began airing Naruto began airing on Toonami on September 10, 2005. The block had been struggling to find a new identity following the conclusion of the Dragon Ball trilogy. Two key shows came along to replace Dragon Ball GT: One Piece and Naruto. Nearly 20 years later, Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto still make up half of the block. Naruto quickly became Toonami’s most popular show. It aired many marathons, with the most famous being the “Hundo” marathon where 100 episodes aired over a weekend to celebrate the 100th episode. Naruto was able to outlast the original Toonami block ending in 2008. While Naruto continued airing for a few months after movies on Saturday nights, the final 11 of 220 episodes never made it to air on Cartoon Network.
Eight months after Toonami revived on Adult Swim as an April Fools Prank, Naruto returned on December 1, 2012. These airings were promoted as uncut Naruto, because they featured scenes that had been edited on Toonami in the 2000s. Naruto proved very popular as a companion to Bleach in the midnight hour during the early years of Toonami’s new Adult Swim block. When Toonami first returned to air, Shippuden was unavailable due to Disney XD having aired the series from 2009-2011. The Disney XD airings were known for censoring violence, language, and sexual content. After a year of Adult Swim airing the original Naruto, a decision was made to rerun the first season. In January 2014, they premiered the sequel, Naruto Shippuden. The original Naruto series vanished 35 episodes through its rerun on September 6, 2014, but Shippuden continued airing for a decade.
Naruto Shippuden is one of the few Adult Swim era Toonami shows that skips the opening. Initially Toonami made long custom openings akin to those from the weekday block for Shippuden to make up for cutting the opening, but the opening bumpers shortened to a standard length eventually. The brevity of Shippuden episodes allowed Toonami to frequently air licensed music videos. The airing of music videos has stopped over the 2020s, but dozens if not hundreds of music videos have aired during Naruto Shippuden.
Reruns have aired occasionally outside of Toonami, mainly in Adult Swim’s 5 am hour. Despite its longevity, Naruto Shippuden has never received a marathon. The closest Shippuden came to a marathon was January 8, 2022, when three episodes aired to fill space before the return of One Piece. In 2022, the series finally received its own commercial, during a year when Toonami often aired double premieres of One Piece and Naruto Shippuden.
The announcement of One Piece taking the entire 1 am hour is an indication that Toonami either can’t afford or doesn’t want to resume airing Boruto. Boruto is the sequel to Naruto Shippuden, featuring the next generation of ninja going to school. It has failed to achieve the same popularity as Naruto and Shippuden outside of Japan, with many Naruto fans feeling it is childish and derivative. Despite lukewarm reception among Western fans, Boruto has continued for hundreds of episodes in Japan where it aired for years in a lucrative timeslot next to Pokemon. Boruto, like the original Naruto, aired only 52 episodes on Adult Swim, initially at 10:30 pm but gradually moving down the block to 2 am as the block lost its earlier hours. The 2018-2019 run of Boruto was even more brief than the Adult Swim run of the original Naruto, because Boruto did not air any reruns outside of a single marathon. Remarkably, Shippuden has aired nearly ten times more episodes on Adult Swim’s Toonami than either its successor or predecessor.
While One Piece has aired nearly as many episodes as Shippuden at 470, its run has been subject to many obstacles, from a heavily edited 4Kids dub that skipped or combined 40 episodes, to Toonami cancelling it and skipping hundreds of episodes on numerous occasions. Even the show that put Toonami on the map, Dragon Ball Z, has never aired every episode on Toonami. Toonami’s attempt at airing Dragon Ball Z’s Ultimate Uncut Edition in fall 2005 was cut short when they quickly returned to airing the censored syndication dub. Shippuden’s 500 episode continual run, interrupted only by movies and marathons, far exceeds the runners up for full Toonami runs: Black Clover, Dragon Ball, Hunter X Hunter, Thundercats, and Dragon Ball Super all managed to fully air 130-170 episode runs.
