Toonamiguy321

Let’s take a short break from bitching about how much Toonami sucks to instead bitch about how much this years April Fools prank will suck. The schedule for midnight 4/1 just populated on the AS website, and nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Perhaps the 2 week schedules will have a better hint. What, if anything, do we expect this year? Last year they raised the bar a little, two episodes of Smiling Friends redone completely with puppets. Amusing, but also extremely short. And the first year in a long time where they didn’t force R&M into the prank somewhere. Not great, but an improvement over 21/22/23. Unfortunately, I don’t think we will go 2 years in a row without R&M as the focus. And with season 8 still sitting with an ambiguous 2025 release date, this seems like the perfect time to either stealth drop an episode like 2017, or somehow drop the actual premier date in between a joke episode.

Space Dandy was also not a Toonami original. Success or not, it’s still one of the most fondly regarded shows the block ever aired. Something that likely would not be the case if Demarco was allowed to smear his shit all over it as a “producer”. That’s the main hurdle for Lazarus. And I know we all love Watanabe, but he is not an infallible wizard either. If AS gave him pocket lint for a budget or Demarco kept interfering, it’s gonna suck.

Losing out on dub premiers is something I can deal with. As streaming gets more powerful every year, this was an inevitable outcome. Especially with the growing animosity towards Toonami for holding shows hostage. Eventually distributors wouldn’t even want to bother offering the block dub premiers. An unfortunate loss, but that’s how it goes. Where I take an issue is that while waiting for those big shows to cool off price wise, they just air nothing. They have to “hold” slots for 3-6 months for some reason, even though 1-2 shows could air to completion in the time that they stall. And then after many months of drought, they land a single show that is long since yesterday’s news and expect praise for it. The ratings are close to a rock bottom holding pattern. A super expensive popular show is gonna do roughly as well as an unknown B show at this point. I’d rather see them invest in a full block of B shows, rather than one slot of a big show. Viewership will not vary much between the two options. And if they really are debating between anime value vs Family Guy ratings, then it’s time to just shut er down. They got plenty of Fox slop in their tank to completely replace the block. Just do it if that’s the plan and stop jerking us around. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that once Family Guy was secured was the same time that Toonami expenditures ceased.

Man, I won’t remember that at all. I could have swore the dub existed before Toonami got it. Say what you will about the block being “necessary”, but it had carved itself out a relevant niche at one point dropping dub premiers of what at the time, was one of the most relevant shows on the market. Now we can’t even get decade old B shows from Sentai. Or anyone. It’s actually astounding how far it’s fallen in a relatively short window of time. Well, if they get first crack at it, they absolutely should grab the dub premier, cost be damned. At least have one reminder out there that Toonami exists. But I suppose we will just have to be content with them maybe getting it a year later.

Of all the legacy titles the block has lost access to, Gundam should be the least surprising. None that aired were exactly ratings blowouts, and needing Demarco to fly out to Japan personally each time to license them was an excessive extra expense. When they got Origins, Demarco was very confident it was airing at like 12:30 or 1. Programming put it where it would do the least harm and apparently kept that info away from Demarco as long as possible. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Toonami premiered the dub for either season of OPM, so not getting S3 as a premier wouldn’t be much of a deviation. As long as we still get it eventually. Which with the current state of things is certainly questionable.

So they are actively running the Lazarus promo, I wonder if it’s a good or bad sign that they haven’t dropped the full 4/5 schedule yet. Is there more on the plate? Or are they just needlessly secretive as they often are?

Ah, so they had enough logical people on the staff to understand Nezuko would be too much to handle for normies and just omitted her entirely. Bold, but also smart.

Fucking Jerry

I am eager to see how MLB normies react to Nezuko with her mouth gag.

I will never understand people like Paul who just watched Rewind die with the rest of us, continue to suggest a further dive into rerun nostalgia. DBZ and Sailor Moon WAS a return to the best, and it was a huge disaster. Toonami can’t survive by constantly looking backwards. Get back into a 2012 mindset and just go for anything cheap and available. Let the audience decide if it’s a winner or not. Seems like as a long as a show is new to the block the audience will give it a shot.

Profits up substantially, subscriber count up, they are gonna be throwing ol Zaz one hell of a party. In the eyes of the stock holders, everything he did was justified and successful.

Oh and for those who care, which id wager is no one, the times on the 3/8 schedule are wrong since they do not account for DST. It doesn’t change the schedule, but the 2a shows are gonna be the 3a shows that night. DVR users be wary.

Not a bad guess, needing an hour timeslot for something is a safer bet than them planning for 2 shows at once. Just a bonus that it syncs its end date with Lazarus. Demon Slayer also helps prop Lazarus up since people will have motivation to tune in for more than 30 minutes. I joked with someone about this a week ago and the laughs abruptly stopped when we both thought about it and realized it’s entirely possible and realistic now that CSE has been added to the block. I hate that they added it because it opens the floodgate for various AS shows to be tagged in as slot filler. I hope you are wrong, but I have a feeling you aren’t.

Finally, a schedule update that improves the block. Not by much, but we are moving the needle in the right direction. Only a very small group of people like us who comb the schedules even knew it was restarting. They never publicly announced it was looping, so I agree this is just them not keeping up on their licenses and just now realizing Kai was running on empty. We are 1 week over the 1 year mark, which is close enough for me to assume these are 1 year contracts. So expect to see this mistake happen again in June with Naruto and Sailor Moon. With that in mind, I do agree it’s weird that they didn’t go with Naruto since we can assume thats going to expire right around the dull part of the chuunin exams. And as we know with One Piece, every week it spends doubled up is one week it can’t air at all. They have a few weeks to spare but I’d assume double OP ends on 4/5. Maybe that’s when they will swap to Naruto since at that point OP won’t be the only premier. With them synced up, they could have Lazarus subs replace one and BE S2 replace the other. 1 premier to lessen the blow of an unnecessary rerun. I wouldn’t hold your breath on two network premiers at once.

Here’s some extra details from Deadline, with one troubling section https://deadline.com/2025/02/shinichiro-watanabes-lazarus-anime-adult-swim-premiere-date-trailer-1236303203/ “The series will air on Adult Swim in English, with new episodes available the next day on Max. English-language encore airings will debut every Thursday at midnight beginning April 10. Episodes in Japanese with English subtitles will debut in the U.S. on Adult Swim and Max 30 days after their English-language premiere.” So they aren’t doing the Ninja Kamui sub/dub sandwich route, but instead the sub is gonna start at an undetermined time a month later. And it just so happens Blue Exorcist ends its run about a month after Lazarus starts. A positive perspective would be maybe Kai leaves to make the room, but it hasn’t exactly been a positive year for the block so far.

And there it is, the first official premier for Toonami took till April 5th. At least the block is actually getting the premier, it was starting to feel like there was a chance we didn’t. Another one from Crappa though, don’t set your expectations too high.

Looks like Zaslav just needed people to trust the plan. People may not like the way he got there but he turned the ship around.

I noticed this back in October or so, Spoiler TV only reports the 18-49 numbers. And even then, it’s like they only do 3-4 channels. Given how long it’s been going on I doubt it will be fixed, so they are probably burned as a resource for ratings now. Programming Insider gets them periodically but sometimes goes multiple weeks without reporting. And right now, the only show eligible for ratings is One Piece, which I can’t imagine is doing too hot with 90 mins of reruns in front of it. Can’t imagine ratings are all that important anymore seeing as they are willing to let FLCL slop reruns occupy midnight. They have given up.

They got lucky with MAWS, primarily because it’s been so long since Superman has gotten his own show. They are overplaying their hand here and likely going to have a gigaflop on their hands. They could have at least went with a different title structure so it wasn’t so blatantly obvious they were riding the MAWS coattails

Sounds like grasping at straws to me. If this resource is legit, we wouldn’t just now be finding out about it in 2025. And they aren’t going to have a show secured that hasn’t even started yet.

They have set Lazarus up with an unwinnable hand. If it had other shows around it, it could be “meh” but still perceived as an ok show. But it’s going to be center stage with zero support so it’s going to have to be a 10/10 every single week since it’s likely going to be the only thing on the block for a portion of its run, if not all of it. It will be nitpicked to death because no one will have anything else to talk about. I have to wonder if whoever is doing programming understand this, or if they just don’t care and just have to air the remaining originals.

The deadline for this years write offs is in a couple days. I didn’t pay this theory much mind, since before yesterday it looked like IFG simply had to step aside so BE S2 could come on with Lazarus. With new information, and seeing BE only double up one week and then get replaced by a wildly unfitting rerun, it certainly looks much more likely that IFG was tossed out with yesterday’s garbage and they had to make hasty schedule changes.

Anime gacha players are a different breed. NFT people at least are thinking about their financial future, even if it’s just scammers trying to out scam other scammers. Gacha players are just in it for the jpeg. Money does not motivate them, just jpegs. Financial security? Generational wealth? No, there is an SSR I need with 0.5% roll odds, I need to take out another loan.

Because the schedule is so jam packed, right? We have been coping they are holding slots since January, cope time is over. If they needed 10 weeks, they could have started Mashle S2 tomorrow and and stalled 12 weeks that way with actual new content. There is no logical explanation for adding this show to the block. Stop trying to rationalize it and just admit it’s a bad move. We would be. I don’t know why they are so insistent on keeping it alive while simultaneously refusing to support it in any way.

Sure, hand me the Sentai catalog and I’ll find you a good one. I don’t care about the genre, I care that this is a show halfway through its premier run, with 3 separate air slots outside of Toonami, clogging up a Toonami slot for 10 weeks. Just cut the damn block to 2 hours, stop doing this to us. Toonami airs ON Adult Swim. It’s not some special, insulated audience. Anyone who cares about CSE started watching it last month when it started. No new eyes are being brought to this show by airing it on Toonami. But there will be new resentment towards the show since it’s airing somewhere it shouldn’t be.