Toonamiguy321

I think the topic of “older” anime gets a little confusing to discuss in Toonami communities. Most hardcore Toonami fans are late 20s to early 30s who grew up with the original block. When I hear “older anime” my brain immediately goes to 90s shows (the type of stuff Toonami should NOT be looking at), but that’s just not the reality anymore. A show that came out in 2012, when Toonami came back on the air, is ELEVEN years old now. That’s damn old by anime standards. Even when we got AssClass, which was roughly 5-6 years old when it ran on the block, it was considered to be pretty well passed it’s prime. And despite that, fans still turned out for AssClass most weeks that it was on the block. I don’t know why Demarco thinks the block can’t subsist on shows from a few years prior. With 3 rotating slots, if I set the Hidive catalog filter to Action - 2012 to 2023 - Dubbed, the block would be comfortably programmed for the next 3-4 years. Is it all quality content? No, there are definitely some stinkers in there I wouldn’t recommend to my enemies, but there is plenty of good to at worst, mediocre stuff in there that we could avoid the bad stuff for some time. And hey, you never know what the audience is going to take to. Akame ga Kill still holds the premier viewer record despite being panned by everyone when it was announced for the block. The Viz catalog is unfortunately not as well stocked. They could fill in some gaps here and there, but Toonami would burn through their action catalog pretty quick with the same filter as above.

I’m right there with you on that. At this point, I’m of the believe they need to just go all in on the Sentai and Viz catalog of shows and stop chasing the hot titles like Witch from Mercury that are now unobtainable to the block with meager budget and relevance. I think the problem is they just don’t want to accept that’s the reality of their situation. We have been seeing a lot of examples of perfect being the enemy of good enough. If they would just start working through the “action” tag in the Sentai and Viz catalog, the block wouldn’t need to consider DC movie stalling for years. The flow of content would make the block not look so dire, even if it isn’t the top shelf shows. And they probably could get their tiny budget to go further by not constantly chasing the most expensive options on the market.

For the moment, our cast off content has been limited to things AS was airing on their regular schedule. We haven’t crossed the line of Max exclusives on Toonami (nor AS) and I hope it stays that way. DC movies have been less about Toonami content and more about using Toonami as a commercial for something vaguely related on Max. Personally I hope it never goes beyond the occasional movie.

I try to be a trooper with the block, if they pick up something shitty I just use it as my poop break. But if it came down to this I think I’d just be signing off for good. Not interested in a block that is a trash can for failed Max projects. I don’t think we are at this stage yet, but I don’t consider it out of the realm of reality either.

What a strange upside down night for the block. It’s not often we see the first show do terrible then everything after it do better. I know I have said it before but Demarco really needs to drop two slam dunks for March. MHA has been volatile as the lead, but it’s not gonna get better if we get two stinkers after waiting this long for news. And since FLCL has a good chance at getting one of those slots, the other show is going to have to carry pretty hard.

Know why it works? Because Adult Swim has a twitter page. They can very easily flip through submissions and find one tied to a twitter account to verify its authenticity. I have no idea why Toonami insists on being a boomer that only has a Facebook page no one interacts with because Facebook is for boomers. Plus, AS knows their own characters. Even back when it was Facebook only, sometimes they would post fanart from shows like Fairy Tail because the art looked close to a show the block did air.

Toonami’s contract entitles them to dub premier every part of the TV anime. That’s gonna be the X factor. The first one at least, seems like it’s going to be a TV special. So we should be good on that one. If part 2 is the same kind of special, we will get that too. If part 2 is a TV film, we should also still be entitled to it. If it’s a theater film, then we are boned. At this stage, I don’t really think they have the time nor the budget for a theater film. Especially since AoT has pretty well fallen out of grace. There are also the statements about this not originally being meant to be a 2 parter, so I’m thinking odds of it being a theater film are pretty low.

I told y’all but nobody wanted to listen. If they are part of the already established contract, Toonami will air them. So that would mean some of the block goes on hiatus sometime in April. If they aren’t part of the contract? Never gonna see them on the block. Personally, I’m a bit relieved the series isn’t going to have another meandering season. Demarco on the other hand, is likely tearing his hair out that one of his only guarantees this year may not be a guarantee, and even if they do land it, it’s only going to cover two nights that they will have to build the block specifically for. I really hope their grand plan was not to air Grunge/stall until AoT was ready. Because if it was, March ain’t looking too hot.

I liked Yolo at first, but this second season has opened my eyes that it’s pretty much just silly Aussie voices on top of nonsense. Normally, that’s fine by me but AS has been really leaning hard on Cusack in recent years. That said, it does take me back to better times when AS shows weren’t trying to be more than a few late night laughs. At this point I have zero expectations for Uzumaki. It’s got too many delays on it to live up to that expectation with just 4 episodes. And even if its 11/10 amazing, it’s just 4 episodes. It will air, we will discuss it for a week, and it will be forgotten. Just as HCC was. Personally I don’t worry about AS as a whole going broke and shutting down. But I do worry about them being forced to cut some costs to make ends meet. When that discussion comes up, Toonami is always #1 on the list. The block is already suffering from major cutbacks, i don’t think it can weather too many more. I don’t see them outright cancelling it, but it being alive on just a diet of One Piece, Naruto and the occasional original for 2 hours a week is worse than death.

I’m looking at their recent slate of content and I don’t think they are going to find what they are looking for. Their big pivot to try to lure in a female audience has done nothing but churn out turd after turd. I don’t know if you watched their shorts event last week, but IMO it was 4 consecutive duds. And currently, we are still in a scenario where we know more Toonami original projects incoming than actual AS projects. If AS isn’t making anything then they aren’t going to discover anything. I do agree R&M has been sinking for some time now. It’s been showing the telltale signs of creative bankruptcy and seasonal rot. They have never been able to balance the demands of the lore audience and the season 1 adventures audience. That said, the half submerged Titanic that is R&M is still a safer and more successful option that any of the other dinghys AS has out in the cable waters. What is most worrisome is it could be easily argued that R&M success is whats paying the bills for the other small time shows to get made. Yes, no longer funding it would free up some capital, but the investors are gonna be pretty scared of risk when there is no clear breadwinner to restock the coffers in the event of a dud.

It’s not like R&M has completely prevented the creation of other new content. The problem is all the other new content does terrible. Even content they make that people like barely holds a candle to R&M performance wise. AS always wanted a Simpsons style show. Something with insanely high viewership that they can just crank season after season out of. R&M was as close as they got to that goal, losing it will be hard to recover from.

I really don’t think AS wanted to fire him. I can’t think of any show that has survived a main character recasting for reasons besides death of the original VA. And AS has nothing else. So these antics were being ignored for the sake of keeping the cash cow mooing. Can’t ignore charges though, but by the sound of it, even then they had to be pressured into action. This is the ideal show where they can just take the piss out of the change. Have Morty screw something up that gives them new voices and Rick shrugs it off as something that may be permanent but he doesn’t know nor care. The tik tok guy is great at imitating Roiland, but does bringing in the closest match force them to admit the only thing keeping the show watchable was Roiland’s (apparently real) drunken, ad libbed stammering? I think it does.

That is a bit of unexpected fortune on our part. As cool as simuldubs are, they really just have not recovered from Covid. And honestly, I think that’s kind of a relief to the dubbing staff. At one point in 2019 we were 1 week behind Fire Force. Having to get an episode, do the script, get everyone in the booth, mix it, etc in less than a week for a huge slate of shows sounds like suffering and chaos for everyone involved. Also with the decrease in simuldubs, it has felt like other legacy projects have gotten more attention. For example, One Piece had its dub moving at a snails pace for like 5 years. Then around 2021 they really got it in gear, and in 2022 they cranked out like 100 episodes. I don’t mind waiting a little longer for brand new shows if it means everyone isn’t so overworked that nothing else gets done. I don’t blame them, in previous years once stall mode starts, things don’t really go back to normal. We have an occasional spurt of something here and there but most of the time is spent jumping between stall tactics. In 2021 it started in October. In 2022 it started in May. In 2023 it started in February, so people are right to be concerned. To me, the most annoying part here is this was likely their only chance this year the surprise the audience because nobody had a clue what might be coming in. Now that things have changed, FLCL is a strong contender for one of the slots. And in not wanting to steal its thunder, probably is joining the block solo. So the people asking if the block is even capable of getting anything are just more to fuel the belief that it cannot. So if we get FLCL in March, that will likely be replaced by AoT. So in the summer months they may have one more chance to do something unexpected between MHA and AoT. Maybe sooner if AoT is as short as people say.

I think his point was they could have went about it a different way which would have generated them extra time. They could have kept this week normal, cut Yashahime next week for the hour finale of MiA, then brought back the Yashahime finale and an extra OP on the 18th. Not as much time, but if they were in a temporary stall mindset they are taking things a week at a time anyway. Instead, they took the path forward that cleaned off the schedule efficiently and as early as possible. That certainly felt like to me, they had a pretty good grasp on what they planned to air on the 18th. Obviously that’s not the case, so one or more deals likely went down the tubes in the past two weeks.

Even Demarco made that statement in a speculative tone. He never said there was a deal or that the relationship changed. He just said that he hoped getting MHA would open more doors with CR. We also should consider that their standing with CR could improve, but not in a way we theorize. For example, CR may allow the block access to shows that aired prior seasons on Toonami, but tell them to kick rocks for anything else. Whatever the case, we just don’t have enough info to go on to say either way. Myself, as well as a few others did caution to not take MHA as a sign CR was going to start full cooperation with Toonami, and it seems that was the correct mindset to take. By the way Demarco was talking about it, it does seem like they tried lining up Witch from Mercury to be one of the new shows on the 18th, possibly even a dub premier. But either Toonami didnt have the budget for it, or CR just wouldn’t let them have it. The problem being, they didn’t have a fallback plan in the event they couldn’t secure it. So now we are in stall mode and just have to hope they can secure something else in the span of the next month. Ideally, the new schedule is posted on or before the 18th. That’s the two week cutoff. But, there is no reason they couldn’t take things up to the first day or two of March. That would mean almost zero promotion for what gets added, but that hasn’t stopped them before. If the new FLCL ends up being an accurate guess, we will probably know sooner rather than later.

I figure they can just make up a reason too. Promote all this stuff airing on Amazon now or wherever the hell it’s getting shipped off to now. Neither of them really synergize with each other outside of being DC, but that’s no reason they can’t promote Shazam. I mean, last night they used random comedy pilot shorts to promote Knock on the Door, this would at least be more fitting.

It really isn’t, and never would have been but during the Covid content drought they dumped it’s reruns on the block so it’s treated as pseudo Toonami now. Thankfully this is just a one and done episode, so hopefully this is the last time it’s used as a cheap crutch for the Toonami schedule.

It may not be obvious now, but I do feel like TOM will tie this into some event at the start of the night on these two weeks. Hard to believe DC just decided to play ball after years of not doing so.

So Rubicon isn’t even a premier apparently, this schedule looks a lot more sucky stallish now. And I feel the need to reiterate this every time it happens, I am so tired of those R&M shorts being listed as part of the block when they never are. Idk why they are so obsessed with tacking those onto the schedule every time.

Rubicon is a one off episode to conclude the series.

I did not. However, technically these are not proper replacements, and more just one night covers, so the question of what replaces Yashahime and MiA still stands. With this new information in mind, I’m ready to revise my speculation. I now believe that FLCL Grunge is a strong possibility in March. Maki was tweeting about it a few days ago, but they didn’t come off as “2 more weeks” types of tweets. They do however, feel like a month from now tweets. I recall other discussion that the dubbing process was under way. So I’m gonna say Grunge at 12:30 in March. Prior FLCL seasons did not lead the block, and given the rocky road the other originals had, I’m gonna say they keep MHA at midnight just to give the block a fighting chance. As for the other slot, given the fact that they are stalling as early as February, I’m gonna stand by them having nothing else and it just going back to One Piece.

You beat me by a minute. Anyway, not really sure how to feel about this. I don’t think this is a panic stalling technique, as Demarco did seem to have some stuff on deck to announce which was probably this. But, it’s still a form of stalling and makes me worry about their prospects for the normal schedule. This means we have to wait another damn month to know what is joining the regular lineup which is the most frustrating part of this.

Nobody had these on their bingo sheet. A little concerned to not have proper new show announcements though

I highly doubt a dead of Saturday night run of 10+ year old episodes of One Piece will have any effect at all on the audience for the Netflix adaptation. I figure there are two audience brackets for the Netflix version. 1. People with very little knowledge of the source material. These are the people they will loop in with advertising. And almost all people in this group probably don’t even know Toonami exists. I’d also say most people in this category don’t even have cable. 2. People well versed in the source material who are going to hate watch. People in this category are either keeping up with the subbed release of the anime, or are keeping up with the manga release. Maybe some of them watch Toonami for the novelty, but Toonami isn’t selling them anything they aren’t already well versed in. I have no clue what caused them to cut OP down to one episode. Perhaps it was never the plan to leave it doubled up and they simply didn’t have enough episodes last year to keep that up. Or maybe the speculation that Toei just wanted it on the block to promote Film Red held some truth. Maybe Toei doesn’t think Toonami is doing enough for it to succeed. Whatever the case, one of the last reasons I could see it leaving is due to the Netflix adaptation. It’s a total non factor for that project.

I can’t even make a guess honestly. A week ago, I probably would have put my chips on Witch from Mercury, but as we know now, that’s not gonna happen. I will bet that at best, we are only getting one new show. The other slot will be given back to One Piece. Just to leave a shot in the dark here, Dragon Quest The Adventures of Dai. That seems like something that would pull Demarco’s attention.