Top Gun

I haven't bothered looking at these things yet, but I've at least recorded them (when I remember to), and I have no idea what I'm actually getting because the cable guide titles and descriptions are for a different show entirely. We always joked about the [as] schedule monkeys, but this network seems like it's being run by a single hamster.

Okay...but this is hardly going to be "Demarco's soundtrack." Even when he's not directing anime, Watanabe is a great music producer for other series (his choices for Shingo Natsume's "Sonny Boy" were fantastic). There's no universe in which he isn't making the calls on his own series.

Prime still does anime? Huh.

As a friend of mine put it, "'That's a short wait.' -- Frieren, probably."

Without Space Ghost, there's no [as], and none of us are here. Rest in peace to a legend.

I didn't know exactly what to expect going into this, but I really enjoyed the first episode. Whip-smart writing coupled with some genuinely impressive animation and background work. I know Mike Judge is an executive producer but it was still funny to hear him doing a much more subdued Hank voice as that asshole CEO. Definitely wasn't expecting to see two DEA agents vibing out to Harry Belafonte.

No, Drake was the son of Diez Barrels, captain of the Barrels Pirates (and himself a former Marine captain). He ran away when Corazon attacked because his father was an asshole who treated him like shit. He had no involvement with the Marines until after his father's death; we saw the Marine ship pick him up at the end of this episode.

That's not what she said.

COME ON AND SLAM AND WELCOME TO JAPAN

There was one funny rant in particular I remember when she was ripping on anime dubs.

Double OP makes a lot more sense than temporary double Blue Exorcist at least. And thank God, someone finally took Old Yeller Kai out behind the barn. The Grunge/Shoegaze thing is still incredibly random.

Yeah, if there's any Toonami that has real promise, it's this one. I'm assuming they just threw some money at Watanabe and said "do what you do best."

Trailer is pretty hype.

Heh, well that was fast.

If we get any third-party acquisitions this year, I hope this is one of them. I love that gang of total idiots.

This one looked pretty butt-ugly, but when I rewatched it I honestly enjoyed it more than Progressive. At least Haruko had some fun dialog in this. Progressive was just fucking weird for weird's sake.

I mean at least that started out as all first-party Nintendo characters, and even after it expanded game characters in general. Fortnite hasn't met a piece of pop culture it can't "How do you do, fellow kids?" with.

So what I'm hearing is that it's the perfect time to launch Excited Boat Monkey Club!

Funny thing is that I thought the show looked really interesting and actually wanted to watch it. Not so much here though.

Oh man, I forgot all about these dweebs still trying to push NFTs in 2025 until Toonamiguy mentioned it. All the more reason for me to blissfully ignore their block.

No matter what winds up happening with the linear cable block, I think there's still a lot of nostalgia value in the Toonami brand itself, and lord knows corporate types are all about milking the shit out of nostalgia brands.

Fortnite has all the energy of a 6-year-old smashing their entire toy box of action figures together.

Macross Plus, Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope, and Carole & Tuesday say hi? Even Terror in Resonance got more positive response than negative from what I saw.

Christ I'm old.

At least there are multiple shows airing every week, albeit most of them reruns at the moment. Mashle kicked ass, and that's a show I probably never would have found on my own. (No idea why the hell we couldn't go right into season 2 though.) As moribund as things are now, Toonami still feels like something resembling a cohesive block of television, or at least much more so than airing a pair of anime series for an hour every other week. And I don't see how any offering on a niche cable channel has the luxury of "finding its groove" in the year 2025, given how few eyeballs are left on cable overall. You'd think the opposite would be true, that a new programming block would want to start things off with as big of a bang as possible to get viewers to tune in. That's what [as] did when it brought back the Toonami brand over a decade ago, kicking it off with multiple new premieres in short order. Or look at what SyFy did with Ani-Mondays back in the day: they blew everyone's faces off with the premiere of Solid State Society, then bangers like Noein and Macross Plus (and Tokko was there too for some reason). Maybe I'm wrong and this thing has some actual staying power, but right now it feels like someone's vanity project, and it wouldn't shock me if it swiftly goes the way of Chiller's weird little anime experiment.