Toonamiguy321

It gets kinda old talking about hopes knowing most things on the market are out of their reach. Sure we could talk about how much I’d like to see them air Chainsaw Man, but what’s the point? Odds are they won’t. All we can do is make educated guesses based on actions they take. If they are this rushed to end MHA, it means either FLCL or Bleach is coming. Which is another roadblock for speculative discussion, if you have been watching this block long enough, you don’t need to speculate or share your hopes, you already know what’s probably gonna happen. Even Food Wars isn’t shocking, if they could do it, they were obviously going to. This post wasn’t meant to be doomerism, just a simple update to spare people checking Facebook next week. And maybe spur a little discussion on why they seem to pressed to get MHA done.

I’m not new, and I have a fairly good memory too, which is why it’s hard for me to believe they have a plan. Let’s recap the past couple years. 2021 - Stall mode starting mid October. No show replacements, double ups and more Black Lotus marathons than I care to count. 2022 - Primal RERUNS as the lead show for 20 straight weeks starting in May. Brief Naruto double up stalling in June. MHA lead slot reruns for a month at the end of the year. 2023 - Yashahime doubled up to clear it off the schedule in February. As of April 2023, still has not been replaced. Made in Abyss also concluded in February, no replacement until mid March. They aren’t sitting on the best track record right now. Obviously, burning through MHA makes it appear they have a plan, but we said the same about Yashahime/MiA. I’d be marginally more confident in them if we weren’t still waiting on a second show announcement. It’s hard to believe #3 is a sure thing when #2 is nowhere to be seen, and #1 only made an appearance 5 days ago. Like I said, I have no enjoyment issues with this lineup. I’d much rather get through one of our running anime than have to skip weeks because they chose to air bottom of the barrel DC table scraps. But I’d also like to have a decent block to tune into later in the year. Nobody is saying it’s going to end, but it easily can go down a path of becoming barely watchable as it has in the examples above.

From an immediate and shortsighted viewpoint, it feels good. We are moving briskly through MHA which makes it feel like we are actually taking notable steps in the story every week. However, this is going to cause some major problems later in the year. 1. The lead slot show is always the most difficult for them to commit to. We saw how much extra time it took them to get something as subpar as Food Wars S5, and they are still short another acquisition going into April. And now they are burning through another show? 2. MHA is currently the most significant show they have on the lineup, and has good odds to be one of the top 3 of 2023, so it’s strange to rush through it especially how hard fought getting it from CR was. Dont get me wrong, I will be throughly enjoying the Toonami schedule for the rest of March. I’m just concerned for the state of the block later in the year, I don’t want to see it in perpetual stall mode or leading with reruns in the next 4-6 months.

The elephant in the room is why not just move MHA to 12:30 and air whatever they are clearly trying to clear the lead slot for right now at midnight? I could see maybe landing something they think warrants 12, but when they already have an open timeslot, why not extend their mileage out of MHA as a 12:30 show? Im kind of starting to wonder if this is just some petty game with Crunchyroll to narrow MHA down to the dub gap we saw from S3-S5. We did have that 4 week S5 rerun stall session back in November, and 4 weeks of double ups eliminates the gap that created.

Sure gets the noggin joggin

May have done them some good to air That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime rather than just shilling it’s movie for no ones benefit besides Crunchyroll for a few weeks about a month ago. I fail to see how airing popular content would generate negative ratings

That may be partially true now, but the surge in LN adaption popularity started around 2015 when Demarco was still firmly in the driver seat. His lack of knowledge on the matter is a major factor. Gill really isn’t any better, they are both late 40s dudes who are way out of touch. This is a difficult topic to discuss because blindly hating isekai is the “cool” thing to do these days. You can immediately detect a bad faith argument when people say things like “isekai #1234”. There ARE good isekai, which are the ones that would be most likely to get the crews attention. The generic seasonal ones would be unlikely to be picked up or even noticed. The fact that the isekai train is still going strong and pumping out generic adaptions every single season is the evidence for why Toonami messed up not getting on the train when they had the chance. For most of the popular examples, isekai shows are action oriented. So they fit the blocks theme, and as an added bonus, usually skew towards a bit older audience, so the block would be airing stuff that doesn’t feel like 4pm Toonami material. Which leads to another point, you see people complain all Isekai is the same, then turn around and praise Toonami for picking up every single generic shonen adaption every season. The fact that the person you were arguing with had the audacity to suggest isekai isn’t even popular goes to show how little they know about what they are talking about. And that just goes to show how out of touch Demarco is, because SAO isn’t even a damn isekai in the first place.

Re:Zero suffered from a pretty bad dub delay, that may be a factor for why it never caught their eye. It was massive in 2016, but by the time the dub came out in 2018, other isekai titles were taking the spotlight. 2018 was when we got Mob, so that may have been the only narrow window of time CR was playing nice with the block but it didn’t happen. And while I love the series and wouldn’t complain if the block got it, the second season was torturous at two episodes a DAY. I can’t imagine the slog at one episode a week. I know that opinions toward isekai are divided, but there is no arguing that a good portion of every seasons anime roster since 2016 has been isekai, and Toonami completely ignoring the genre has easily been one of their biggest mistakes. The block should have at the very least dipped their toes into some while they had the chance. The Kadokawa ones are the least divisive and generic. Overlord, Youjo Senki, and Cautious Hero were Funimation titles that Toonami should have been able to pull off had they been open to doing so. Re:Zero, Konosuba and Shield Hero have always been stuck in the Crunchyroll prison.

Demarco’s anime/manga/LN knowledge has always been pretty limited. The surge of LN adaptions came long after he fell off the wagon. Had Toonami had some type of younger advisor for show choices a few years ago I’d bet we would have seen more LN content. We have now and then seen Demarco express interest in stuff like Shield Hero and Konosuba, but as with many problems the block has had, a lot of the popular LN adaptions run into the Crunchyroll problem. Plus, if they were just using surface level online engagement to pick unfamiliar shows, shonen, especially from Jump, always surges to the top of its season. Any time Demarco dropped a top 5 request list it was almost always new shonen. So any LN stuff that didn’t soar to top of the charts like SAO had pretty much no chance getting on their radar.

Well damn, now Plantasm has to air in a tiny box at the bottom of the screen during the other shows.

G4 is bizarre to look at in the modern day. It doesn’t matter if the clip is good or bad, it all seems like it came from an early era YouTube channel, one that after it’s small relevance faded, could have been quietly deleted and taken all these questionable bits to the grave where only a handful of people would remember them, but not be able to find the proof they happened. But nope, it was a real deal network on TV and almost all of it is preserved. The attempted reboot felt like it should have been a YouTube channel, because cable is dying, and there is no market for its content on cable. I don’t think there is anything they could have done to make G4 work in 2022.

I actually really like Amagi Brilliant Park, but it’s not really action so I didn’t list it. If Demarco is willing to go back to his 2018 promise of a more diverse lineup I’d love to see it. Another non action on there I thought was great is Haven’t you Heard Im Sakamoto. Id also love to see a battle harem like Infinite Stratos on the block. It’s a great entry step into the genre. The BD did add nipples, but the TV cut is tame enough for TV run. I enjoyed Familiar of Zero too. It even got a second spinoff season. They were able to have that attitude pre 2019 when the entire anime market was their oyster and they could casually grab any show when they needed it. That’s not their situation anymore. Demarco is at least pretending to listen here, so it’s a good time to shoot your shot on a show you like even if years prior you know they wouldn’t touch it. Maybe if they see adequate demand for something they will get over themselves and air it just to fill a slot in.

You are right, and perhaps I was expecting too much to see any visible change in viewership. I just thought maybe even a small percentage of that online enthusiasm might transfer over to the actual block, even if only for a single night. I still say, even though we didn’t see it in the actual numbers, having the block reach that many individual impressions was still a good and worthwhile thing.

Here’s the full list if you are interested. Couple decent things in there that would fit the block. I’d love to see BTOOOM, GATE, No Game No Life, and School Live. https://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2022/03/24/food-wars-is-it-wrong-to-pick-up-girls-in-a-dungeon-and-more-are-leaving-crunchyroll

Because Nielsen is an average system. More engagement = average goes up. It did not, so it seems the online engagement it got was more just discussion of the episode finally being dubbed, not actual interest in watching it. Its not a big deal. I was just a little shocked at the absurd level of engagement that post about it was getting, and hoped it would lead to some new faces dropping by.

Not anymore. It was one of many Sentai titles to be pulled from CR after the merger.

Some further context to the point I was making about the One Piece post a week ago, here’s the Food Wars reveal engagement after 24 hours. Not even 500 likes. I know, S5 is divisive, but even so, this is the first new show reveal for 2023, and this is all the engagement it can drum up. Meanwhile the crossover post was well over 70k likes and like 25k shares. Unfortunately, that engagement doesn’t seem to have translated to ratings, but at least it was some word of mouth engagement that Toonami still exists.

With 4 seasons and a theater movie, im kinda surprised it never naturally got on their radar.

IMO from a Toonami potential perspective, it’s better to look through the Hidive catalog as it has a filter for dubbed content. https://www.hidive.com/dubs You bring up some hurdles they need to learn to get over. I wouldn’t say “most” isn’t action. There is a healthy amount of action shows here to choose from. At least enough to keep 3 timeslots stocked for a year or two. Same for archive binging, if they can get Sentai on board, just do it. Maybe years ago they weren’t willing, but that’s no excuse not to try again. Even if Urusei is on their radar, that’s one show. That would only be with us for 6 months, they need to be thinking about what happens after + what happens with the other timeslots. Having a rotating B tier Sentai slot at 1am would be great for morale. I think most fans of the block would rather see it air something, rather than nothing and have the schedule uncertain every other week. Cause these days that’s the only two options, Crunchyroll gets all the top shelf stuff and won’t let us have it.

https://twitter.com/Clarknova1/status/1632886517830959106?cxt=HHwWhIC23d7olqktAAAA Not that I expect this to amount to anything in the near future, but maybe this is a sign they are finally going to start taking the Sentai catalog more seriously later in the year. So if there is a Sentai show you are passionate about, now would be a good time to bring it up.

Their S&P crew would probably quit out of sheer frustration of all the boobs they would have to censor every episode. And the fans would have to explain to newcomers why the “untouchable” queen gets touched and molested every episode.

I kind of agree, but personally I don’t use ratings for my opinion on the Golden age, but rather the quality of content. 2015 after the big cut was definitely one of them with KLK which I still am shocked they were able/willing to pull off. Then later in 2015 we started to dip into the Sentai catalog after ignoring it for the prior 3 years. And unlike these days, they picked out two shows that didn’t feel like their typical choices. We started out 2015 in crisis, and ended it with a bright feeling future. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long into 2016. Dimension W, while being mediocre and forgettable, looked like they had some kind of seasonal deal with Funimation to grab and off the beaten path title every few months. But that wasn’t the case, and mid 2016 is when the shonen jump curse started. First it was HxH, then it was Jojo and at that point we were way overloaded on shonen jump content. There was a small beacon of hope in 2017 when they cancelled One Piece, maybe they finally realized they had too much Jump content, but it didn’t last and they kept grabbing it. Thankfully, most modern Jump shows are seasonal, so a lot that we got in recent years didn’t feel like as much of a burden since we got breaks from it every 12-26 weeks. Despite still being too reliant on Jump shows, I actually was pretty enthusiastic for mid to late 2019 Toonami. The block felt like it could grab anything at any time. But early 2020 came and they just stopped replacing shows, then Covid happened and the block has been on a pretty steady decline since. Occasionally in the past 3 years we have small blips of time where things feel like they get better but don’t last. tldr - im putting my dart on 2015 for the blocks peak.

Aren’t the fourth and fifth plate the only Sentai shows that CR has fingers in? If so, I’d say this is still an outlier.

Finally some news, good lord. S5 of Food Wars was terrible, and I’d have been fine leaving the Toonami at S4, but beggars can’t be choosers. Goofy ass food nen is better than nothing. And, it’s only 12 episodes, so we aren’t stuck with it for long. Putting that aside, let’s break down some other theories. Either the stall till AoT theory is something they gave up on because CR won’t rush it out for them, or it was simply never reality and they have genuinely been fighting for a new show since the start of February. I think now we can assume AoT will air the first or second Saturday of April, as that is 5 weeks from the sub, just as we saw with prior seasons. More shocking, MHA is going into a third week doubled up. They easily could have put Food Wars at 12:30 and OP at 2x for the foreseeable future. So we have to ask, what’s the plan here? What could they have on deck that’s so significant they are willing to blow through MHA at double speed? Bleach is the obvious guess, but it’s already so far behind, why rush towards it? If they started it in the summer they could have went straight to S2. FLCL doesn’t make much sense either, as MHA could have just been moved to 12:30, or FLCL could have run at 12:30 and got a running start from MHA runoff. We finally get some news, but now I feel like there are more questions.

Im not an immortal blob of goo nor a well potted blob of goo either. I feel like there is supposed to be a joke in here somewhere but I’m not getting it. As far as your twitter friend goes, I don’t give a damn what opinions someone with 39 followers has, and I’m not sure why anyone else would either. Best guess is they did not want to commit to this until it was absolutely unavoidable. They probably took a gamble on getting AoT by next week and it’s clear now that won’t happen. The week after though? I could see it being ready by then.