Top Gun

Jojo's "leaving soon" because its first season will be finished in a couple of months. Toonami may or may not pick up the second season, Stardust Crusaders, but even if they do I doubt they'll air it immediately after the first season wraps up. And none of us know if we'll be around in a few years ourselves, or hell, if anyone will be (Giant Meteor 2020!). Just watch what you like and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

The Davy Back Fight was actually canon...well half of it anyway. The manga had the first two games shown in the anime, then finished things with Luffy's boxing match with Foxy. The anime added in an additional Davy Back Fight and three additional games. Also, in the original manga the Straw Hats encountered Aokiji on Long Ring Long Land immediately after the Davy Back Fight ended, while the anime had a short filler arc and then another filler with Foxy reappearing before Aokiji showed up. Also, starting with Fishman Island would have only worked if FUNI would have been able and willing to start immediately dubbing those episodes, as the home video releases were a long ways back from there when OP started airing. This was before the concept of simuldubs took off, so it probably wasn't a valid option then.

Honestly I think OP was somewhat hamstrung right from the beginning with where Toonami chose to start the broadcast. No matter one's feelings on it as a fan, the Davy Back Fight is a terrible place to jump into the series as a first-time viewer. As goofy as OP's humor can be in general, Davy Back cranks it up to 11, and unlike most of the rest of the series there aren't any larger serious stakes in the background (unless you're 10 years old and treat "onoz Foxy will steal teh crew!!1" as a harbinger of doom). It was nothing more than an arc of Oda engaging in some random zaniness, and then Toei doubles down by stretching it out twice as long. Pretty much the only thing of lasting import to come out of it, besides providing Toei with a dumbass villain to shove in any filler they saw fit, was the crew meeting Aokiji, and with the way Toei arranged things it would have been fairly simple to just skip straight to that episode. You get the plot nugget that matters, and then things move right into Water 7/Enies Lobby, what many fans consider to be one of the series' all-time peaks. I think that would have had a better shot of grabbing more of those critical early viewers. Obviously the elephant in the room is that a show of OP's gargantuan length really needed more than one new episode per week. You'll never convince me that giving it at least a partial weekday slot at 1 or 2 in the morning couldn't have consistently outdrawn whatever tired comedy retreads [as] slaps down then, but no one can ever accuse the non-Toonami side of the network of showing any sort of programming initiative. So failing that, what's the other option? As crazy as it sounds, I can't help but wonder if starting from the very beginning wouldn't have been a viable choice. Like, if you're going to be hundreds of episodes behind regardless, and if a bunch of your potential audience is current with the weekly Japanese broadcasts, why not roll with it and double-down on what you have? Play up the fact that the first 150 episodes of the series have never aired uncensored in the US. I mean the promos would have written themselves: "It's One Piece, the way it was always meant to be seen, uncut in all its glory. Only Toonami." Maybe I'm just crazy, but I feel like that alone would have garnered some pretty substantial initial interest.

They've been cheap forever. Calm down.

Well this is shitty. I mean I held no illusions that the run would continue indefinitely, but I figured we'd at least get through Marineford. Not getting to see Sabaody and Impel Down is a bitter pill. (No Keimi? Or The Punch? Or goddamn Hancock? ) I know its ratings weren't exactly setting the world on fire, but you wouldn't think they'd really need to for something airing at the tail end of the block. I guess it got too cost-prohibitive for DeMarco to keep grabbing new seasons. Four years is better than nothing, and yeah I have probably like 100 episodes ahead on DVD, but it's far more satisfying to get the dub in HD with all of the usual block trappings. The worst part, if you'll excuse the prejudgement, is that what we're getting instead just screams Hot Topic edgelord bullshit. Didn't we already suffer through enough of that with how fuckawful Akame was?

Those cheek zig-zags look profoundly stupid.

Man, you leave the fence door open and there's no telling who will wander in...

It's been at " peak" popularity pretty consistently for several years now. The anime itself is consistently in the top 5 most-viewed weekly anime series, behind only such perennial family juggernauts as Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko-chan. Obviously the manga volumes sell gangbusters, and the merchandise prints money. It's been at least 15 years since The Simpsons was that relevant financially. I'm so glad reading comprehension is your strong suit Zeni.

Yeah, at this point it's a given that nothing's going to change. Either you've grown frustrated enough that you've given up on the week-to-week anime and just watch select scenes, or you've learned to accept it for what it is and glean your personal level of enjoyment from it. And hell, sometimes the Toei padding actually manages to be enjoyable. (See: everything Carrot.)

I dunno, maybe the fact that you've been shitting up threads for more than half a decade with your bizarre obsessive hateboner schtick? Or that you play up this ridiculous dudebro persona while simultaneously obsessing over shows to the point where you're a bigger weeb than just about anyone here? I could go on if you like. No, sane people judge a work on its own merits and can easily ignore a lone nutter babbling incoherently. Non-sane people get sucked into the insanity. Seriously, do you know what normal people do when we don't like something? We just don't watch it. Or even if we do watch it for the lulz, we don't take massive shits in places where people who do like it are talking, because that'd just be acting like an asshole. You talk about particular shows like they touched you in your no-no place when you were 8 years old. Get some goddamn help already.

Seriously, go get a room and fuck already.

Dude, get fucking laid or something. How pathetic do you have to be to bitch about Japanese cartoons airing at 2:30 in the goddamn morning?

Togashi, as in the creator of Hunter x Hunter. I only saw its 1999 anime adaptation after sitting through Naruto's opening arc, and all I could do was be amazed at just how much Kishimoto had ripped off the Hunter Exam (down to very minor details!) for the Chunin Exam, only he managed to lose most of what made the former enjoyable in the process.

Admittedly I still haven't made it around to San Andreas, and it probably has more content, but I never felt bored playing Vice City. I've never seen another game utterly nail a given atmosphere from top to bottom in every aspect of its being. It just oozes cheesy 80s nostalgia from every pore, and the soundtrack is far and away the best licensed-music collection any game has ever seen.

They are tiny, but at least there's still tactile feedback and a clear differentiation between keys. Every time I have to type on a normal smartphone my sausage thumbs turn it into a living hell.

Because you knew you'd be pepper-sprayed and/or arrested?

TIL that we only get TCM in standard-def because Verizon is dicks.

Vice City 4 lyfe.

Hasn't Alabama inbred itself out of existence yet?

Just 10 FilmAF pages' worth of disks, that's all.

Eh, I definitely enjoyed Battle Tendency more than Stardust Crusaders, though Diamond is Unbreakable may have managed to leapfrog it.

I figure it's tomato to-mah-to at this point.

I can and will, because Togashi did it far better first.

I will take Toei's horrible OP pacing a thousand times over Naruto screwing off canon material for two goddamn years straight. And yeah I know that was the original series, but still, just think about that. Two. Years. And then like 30 episodes into Shippuuden, they somehow need to launch straight back into more filler. It's pathetic. As glacial as OP can be these days, at least you're always getting a steady trickle of new content, albeit sometimes one agonizing droplet at a time. The only real thing Naruto's adaptation has in its favor is that Toei usually looks like they're making OP on a shoestring budget, and even its best moments are just 15-second flashes of good animation. Both the original Naruto and Shippuuden have a few select episodes with almost movie-budget animation that are a fantastic watch.

Honestly I like that it's much closer tonally to the start of the original Dragon Ball than DBZ ever was. Toriyama was far better at writing lighthearted comedy than super-srs-bzns apocalyptic stakes. Toonami has been my first time going through both DBZ and Super, and I just could not get over how staggeringly dumb the former was.