Toonamiguy321

I mean, Mashle did 227k last week. By modern standards that’s pretty solid. So there IS still an audience out there somewhere, they just aren’t tuning in to Toonami. It’s almost like the Toonami schedule is nearly all reruns and that doesn’t encourage people to tune in.

It did always feel like originals were an insurance. As long as they existed, Toonami would also exist. But without them as premieres, and no acquired content, I don’t see a reason the block should continue on. I also agree that it feels like no one there cares anymore. They have an intern on Facebook duty and that’s about it. Unlike before where he clearly was still involved, it actually does feel like Demarco has been removed from the block entirely. Part of his reason for bailing on social media is because he won’t have the answers anymore and doesn’t want people to notice. Politics just makes for an easy smokescreen. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt on this, because I think a pure anime project like this has no appeal outside Toonami hours, but the more I think about it, the more things line up with it not being our premier. My latest realization? An April premier means that it’s waiting till Common Side Effects completes its run. I hope I’m wrong because if it actually isn’t a block premier, Toonami might drop down to a single premier show.

Suddenly I’m motivated to keep this thread alive. I don’t know why. Anyway, remember how I said two weeks ago was a record low? Lmao https://programminginsider.com/saturday-ratings-abc-leads-the-night-with-nba-matchup-of-lakers-warriors/ 113/0.05 for Mashle, and 83/0.04 for One Piece. This year is gonna be the year we see double digits at midnight.

We got numbers for the 11th too https://toonamifaithful.com/toonami-rating-for-january-11th-2025/ A dismal 132k for Mashle, the new record low for a lead show. But it did turn right back around, so hopefully that was just a hiccup caused by the 3 weeks the block took off its normal schedule. One Piece is getting cooked by the rerun hour before it, don’t know why they put so much stock into schedule consistency.

I mean, them eating dicks doesn’t change that it’s exclusive. And selling one anime license to a dying cable network probably won’t move the needle on their financial problems so I doubt it’s even a consideration. Same with Jojo, Netflix has an exclusive contract for it for 25 years. They don’t need money and Toonami doesn’t have any money anyway. Just isn’t gonna happen. I’m sure Demarco WANTS it to happen, as you say, both shows have been on the block before, but wanting something isn’t enough. They don’t care about competition, they just don’t want to share their toys because why should they? Even if they COULD, it would be blowing a huge chunk of the yearly budget. Toonami isn’t just one show, they need a whole schedule.

You don’t realize what you have till it’s gone. There was never delays or stalling, a show ended, a show was replaced. Every time, on time. You had to keep up with the block news much closer because show announcements would just drop at random. It was rare having to wait till the 2 week cutoff mark, but if it did reach that point, it never went over. It was easy to predict which Jump shows they would shoot for, but the block also had enough flexible slots that you had a curveball every couple months. Something like Blue Exorcist would never get on Toonami today because it’s not hyper popular Jump material. These days the safest prediction to make is “nothing” since the popular stuff is off the table and they won’t even try the less popular stuff. I do agree, come October Daima will be the first acquired show of the year and the smoothbrain audience will think we won huge.

I usually don’t give them much credit, but I don’t think they would do us like this for an anime original. Western original? That’s a coin toss, we got half of Superman and IFG. And I’d argue Superman has the most prestige of any network original the block has aired and they still handed us the premier for the second season. Lazarus is a total unknown, and given Demarco’s track record so far, probably a failure, so they will try to extract the most from it by not dividing the audience. Later on, I could see it getting a marathon outside of Toonami hours, but I’m fairly confident the premier will land on Toonami. But now that I type it out, I realize we do have a chance of getting screwed with the sub/dub thing. I’m hoping R&M only got that treatment because it’s R&M and that’s not the norm for the future. Bleach is still exclusive to Disney so that shouldn’t be on anyone’s potential list. YYH is held by Crunchyroll. If that was an option, it would have been in Rewind’s launch roster. If it comes down to it and they have the choice between MHA and Daima, they would choose Daima every single time. They will always put full priority onto anything DB. The fees shouldn’t be equal. MHA S7 is pushing a year old now so it should be accessible. The question is, will CR sell it? Right now it certainly appears that door has closed.

I’d expect it to be more than a fourth. The upcoming shuffle will be a slight revitalization to the block, but come mid summer when they need to do it all again? We will go right back into the shitter. A 2 week marathon run for Lazarus at minimum, same as Kamui got. Really, all hopes of block improvement hinge on the Rewind shows expiring in June. If they don’t, 4 slots are plugged up for good. Where does the obligatory Lazarus rerun go then? And the Primal S1-2 rerun in preparation for S3? Has to take one of the 3 flexible slots. And if BE does go into S2, that locks its slot down for the rest of 2025. I wouldn’t expect that, they seem to be very strategic with their originals so they can get the most mileage out of each one. The one exception was Uzumaki, but that’s because we waited 5 years to see it in October. And it’s not like R&M was a Toonami premier either.

So here are some hypothetical scenarios for how they squeeze this onto the schedule. We don’t know when in April it’s gonna land, but I’d bet sooner rather than later since it’s also airing in Japan. 12 - new show (Mashle S2, Dr Stone, take your pick 12:30 - filler from March 15 - April XX. New show moves here when Lazarus starts Rest stays the same. Don’t know what filler option they would choose. If they were cool, this would be a great time to put Blue Exorcist on double speed to blow through that crappy filler stretch. And doing so means no other schedule adjustments are needed. 12 - new show (moves to 12:30 when needed) 12:30 - another new show (moves to 1 when needed) So where does Lazarus fit in here? If DBZ Kai is only licensed up to episode 47, it should be running out around April. Kai leaves, everything shifts down 30 minutes, Toonami returns to a tolerable 4 premiers. A longshot, but would do wonders for audience morale. There are worse options, like double reruns, a month of marathons, etc, but I’m willing to extend them a tiny bit of credit that it won’t get that bad. Otherwise, why move Mashle to the lead slot? S2 is the easiest answer to plugging that gap for a month.

Ok, but how does this fit into the schedule puzzle? Even if this starts the first week of April, that still requires 3-5 weeks of stalling the only two upcoming open slots. I guess now we can consider Mashle hopping right into S2 at least since we will need something to hold down the lead slot for awhile longer.

Yea we will never make it back above 3 premiers. 3 will be a special treat that happens occasionally, while 2 will be the expected normal. Probably late 2025 we will have some stretches where it’s just 1, but we can’t ever go lower than that until they pull the plug on OP. March will likely be one of those short stretches that put us back to 3 for a few months, as the placement of IFG and Mashle indicate replacements incoming. But then those shows end towards the start of summer and we hit another lull. The way the schedule is set up now seems to just be to stall until the next original is ready. But they don’t want to send an original onto center stage with no other premiers, since the other premier is usually the carrot on the stick to watch Demarco’s latest dumpster fire. I’d assume they are still operating on a 50 episode per year deal with OP, and doubling it up on week 1 of 2025 for 7-10 weeks is seen as too risky. They have enough problems as is without having to worry about OP running out of episodes in October. I expect them to start the process when Naruto and SM expire. We will probably have a marathon or something right after it happens, and the “new” schedule will come back 1 hour shorter. Then as the year goes on, we will see them chip away at other slots. We will get more dignity than Rewind, where people saw it was dead a week before they announced it was dead, but it will also be a slow crawl to the grave like we saw in 2008. Everyone knows it’s coming based on the state of the schedule, it just a matter of when it’s made official. There is still a pretty large group of defenders out there who rush to the blocks defense every single schedule update no matter how trash it is. They are a loud minority, mostly because people who would criticize the block have simply dropped it and no longer engage with it at all. But if you don’t know better and read the comments on the Facebook posts or Reddit, you’d think the community was ecstatic to restart Naruto and Sailor Moon. If we get a new show announced next month, those same people will take a “told you so” stance about how people just had to be patient. They will ignore the block being down to 2-3 premiers, and just act like it’s an absolute win.

They could probably pull a little mileage out of renaming the anime section into Toonami. Doesn’t need animation or voice, just the name has value.

It really isn’t even an inflation thing. People look at their cable bill and say, why the hell am I paying for this thing I rarely watch? Been that way for over half a decade now.

“We will literally never air this anime stop asking me and go watch it somewhere else” ”Lol JK” ”W-why isn’t anyone watching?”

And my reward for showing a tiny bit of optimism is being shit on. Having the entire Rewind schedule vomited onto Saturday is such a great way to start out 2025. I’m assuming this is a restart from episode 1, as R would have been worth noting and not putting in the very last slot. Now looking forward, it’s much harder huff hopium because the next free slots are over a month away. We are going to have to sit through that entire IFG rerun at 12:30. Well, I won’t, as I will watch Mashle and go to bed. 2025 is not gonna be a good year for this block.

I guess that’s true, similar to how they don’t want to pull the plug on Checkered Past entirely as in the future, they may be able to put that branding back to use. I guess a compromise I would accept is heavily cutting Toonami’s timeslot so there is no false hope of it improving in the future, especially if internally they know they don’t intend to do much with it. If the block was cut to 1 hour next week, with Mashle and One Piece being the survivors, absolutely nothing at all changes for most viewers. But we can look towards the future with much less speculation and expectations. But, as I do expect a return to 3 premiers, I believe a 2 hour timeslot would be a better fit. That allows 2 rotating premiers, One Piece, and a flexible, but normally rerun slot. No extra fluff, no increased expectations. Just the bare minimum time for the bare minimum investment into the block they are willing to make.

Its story is what held it back though because its story is really dull and incomplete. Shenmue got popular due to its gameplay, the GTA sandbox before GTA was a thing. Adaption wise, the anime stayed pretty true to the material, and it’s not its fault the material is boring. If they don’t want their stuff to premier on Toonami, at least give it the money to license stuff. And if that’s also too much to ask, put the block out of its misery.

I dunno, that sounds little light on the action side of things. Sounds like it would be a better fit for normal AS. Though, it also sounds like Food Wars: Violence edition, and we had 5 seasons of that so we will probably end up with it.

I suppose we don’t. I know nothing at all about the series, but from the assumptions I gather from the cover art, I assumed the getting of Jiro was action oriented.

I think we can confidently write of Daima, at least for this schedule cycle. Why? Because if that was the show, Mashle would not have moved to midnight. They would have gladly torpedoed viewership for a few weeks with IFG reruns at midnight if Daima was in the wings. Mashle moving up is one of our biggest hints here. It’s hardly “being buried” beyond an optics standpoint. It literally just aired to completion at midnight. No other rerun has been given the luxury of a full rerun that early, 3am is where it belongs. I don’t care much for One Piece but IFG scaring the audience off (because they just watched the show) isn’t fair to it. OP barely is surviving BE reruns, and that’s been off for 10 years. We shouldn’t rely on leaks as a consistent source of info. Odds are when Ninja Kamui leaked, AS patched up that hole so it wouldn’t happen again. We are still in the first days of January, so any original still has a little bit of time left to be revealed in the typical window. For lack of a better comparison, it’s Mashle without Mash kicking people’s teeth in. Same vague Harry Potter parody but it’s exclusively comedy. Mostly PG comedy, I’m really surprised it’s an AS thing at all. It would be incredibly out of place on Toonami, but I don’t put it past them shoving it on there just so they have to license one less show.

Yea I feel the same way. It’s not an issue that needs a replacement, it’s an issue that needs gotten rid of. Anime does not need direct western influence in its creation. Anime has been rocketing to prominence primarily because it does NOT have direct western influence. I say direct because it’s well documented that Japanese projects have made changes on their own in an effort to be more appealing to the west, primarily with the removal or censorship of fanservice. Unfortunate, but that’s more Twitter’s fault than anything.

No chance. The only relation the two things have is Demarco working on both. AS programming doesn’t care if a theater film flops. What Saturday is actually being punished for is Rewind failing. He may not be the only problem, but he is a common problem on everything he works on. Pulling him out of the drivers seat has very high odds of improving projects, while having low odds of making them worse.

I don’t think we can really blame S&P here. Let’s gauge out the vague upper limits for content from things we had in the past. Kill la Kill was about as sexy as things have ever gotten, so things can be extremely close to nudity, just so long as there are no nipples. As we heard about the Fujiko Mine special, if there are too many nipples, they don’t want to do the work needed to blur them. Fair enough. So looking at your previous examples, Chained Soldier would be a no go, not because of the content, but because we get to see boobs too often over the course of the show. But something like Danmachi should be fair game, because despite its fanservice levels, we never actually see any nipples. There are significantly more action titles in the Sentai catalog with Danmachi levels of acceptable fanservice than there are Chained Soldier full nudity shows. Other factors don’t matter much to AS. I don’t think there is any upper limit for violence, and Black Lagoon is one of the harshest dialog dubs on the market which they seemed fine with just bleeping hundreds of times.

Even the faithful have their limits. Every time we see the schedule hit a new low it’s a breaking point for some to finally make the call to drop the block. A lot of fence riders would have a “it’s bad now but will get better” mindset, but recently years make it incredibly obvious it will only just slowly get worse, and even many die hard casuals are waking up to this. We are here talking about a best case scenario where the block returns to 3 premiers, one of which is One Piece. It’s not hard for people to make the decision. And you just know the higher ups are eager to see a ratings dip so they can squeeze a little more Fox time on Saturdays. The unfortunate thing is, Crunchyroll’s strategy of simply starving the block of content till it dies wouldn’t work at all if they were more open to lesser shows from Sentai, Aniplex, etc. If it’s new to Toonami and not a top 10 pile of shit, people will watch it. Instead we get to sit here and watch them fill it to the brim with reruns, which will cause a ratings nosedive, which will cause cuts. But I guess given the current situation, is a 2 hour Toonami really any different than the mess we have now?

I don’t think there is any business logic to it, it’s purely an ego thing. At a time long ago, Toonami truly was the king of anime in the west. Crunchyroll wants that title for themselves. And it’s not good enough that the old king is in a retirement home in a wheelchair, they want the old king dead. The Toonami name still carries a lot of respect among anime fans, even if the current schedule is anything but respectable. If one single person thinks “this is on CR, but oh it’s on Toonami too so I’ll watch it there”, that’s too much for them. Plus, even looking at it from a business standpoint, what does CR gain from working with Toonami? A paltry sum of money for each license? Hardly worth making a show less exclusive. Even looking at some of our allies, the only reason Aniplex works with Toonami is because the current top people at Aniplex like the block. It’s not a logical business choice, it’s just Toonami fans in the correct position of power. By blocking content CR was a large contributor to Rewind dying. And the current disastrous state of Saturday won’t be good for its longevity, even if this Dr Stone theory works out. It’s a grind, but killing Toonami is what CR wants.