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Well this frick’n sucks. I was concerned they would rerun MHA at 12:30 if they had nothing but somehow they went with something even worse. Welcome to GENNAMI and an hour of reruns starting the block until whatever the hell they are trying to get approved can finally air. The only reason I’m still holding out for the Titan special is the fact the dub hasn’t streamed. We’ll see how long that remains to be the case. And as for who else gets the dub of MHA? That would be Hulu. If memory serves, they usually get it a year after Crunchyroll but they might get it a little quicker now.

WBD is definitely still a mess and Adult Swim has less staff than they probably have had since the early days.

There were times prior to 2020. 2018 with Mob. A few times in 2019. Before that they loaded up on long runners, most of which they could announce a month or so in advance. Before that they mainly relied on that library deal with FUNimation and the occasional Aniplex show. No one wants to make a library deal with Toonami now because just about every distributor has their own service. Simuldubs definitely complicated things in multiple ways but now they even get hung up trying to get shows that were dubbed 1-5 years ago.

They can simply preempt everything but Unicorn on whatever Saturday the Titan special is ready. It would have been best to use April 29th for Titan but it’s not the only night they can work it in. Works out well enough if it waits till May 13th but they could even make it work on May 6th whether or not they choose to lead Toonami with Unicorn 3peats or toss it on at 2am. But as long as that special is looming but not ready they probably won’t start another show besides Unicorn. So hopefully it’s ready by May 13th but as stupid as it would be, I would not be surprised if it is airing next Saturday and it ends up being a Tuesday, Wednesday or even Thursday announcement because CR isn’t saying anything sooner. They confirmed the dub premiere of Dr. Stone more than a week in advance so they’re not strictly avoiding announcements till a few days before. Ugh… this state of uncertainty is grating but all we can do is wait and see. Probably best to expect nothing of interest for next Saturday and maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised with what they actually do.

At this point I wouldn't count on a reveal on air tomorrow. They either have to run the Titan special with less than a week's notice or do something else with less than a week's notice. Probably just gonna be 2 reruns of MHA if they don't want to double up Food Wars and/or One Piece one week.

Not a peep from Crunchyroll about when the dub for the Attack on Titan will go up so even 8 days out Toonami’s hands are stilled tied.

He was playing it up trying to get a rise out of DeMarco because someone dares them to.

It tracks with their prior behavior unfortunately. Toonami can’t legally say anything about something airing until CR lets them and CR is the type of company that usually announces things just a few days before they stream with some exceptions. But it could also be the case that Toonami isn’t sure the Titan special will be ready to air on 4/29 and that’s more so why they aren’t confirming anything yet. What I mentioned shows the stark contrast of prior years when Toonami was allowed to announce Titan weeks ahead of broadcast and even before the Japanese broadcast on two occasions. They didn’t have to hold back on telling us they secured the next season even though it was basically a foregone conclusion that they had it. FUNimation let Toonami give plenty of notice when a new season was coming. The current CR is even worse at giving advanced notice of most things than Toonami is in general and that’s saying something. I can cut CR at least some slack with that though because they have a LOT more shows to promote every year than Adult Swim does. CR could stand to loosen up about letting Toonami hype up shows sooner though. They had dang well better let Toonami announce it by this weekend. Less than a week’s promotion for a pretty major event is really a waste. Unrelated to that, it seems Unicorn will encore Fridays at 7pm. That means not counting late night/early morning encores that Toonami would be the third airing in 3 days. I do think Unicorn should rerun in prime time but that’s sure not doing Toonami any favors if it’s going to be the lead show in May, even if the 7pm airing is much less likely to get noticed compared to a potential Toonami airing.

One Piece won the night in 18-49 and MHA lost to Food Wars in 18-49 (but did better in some demos). Safe to say promoting the premiere for midnight but airing it at 12:30am caused confusion. Food Wars is a healthy distance away from the 5 digit club this week thankfully.

True, CR most definitely are far from being an ally right now. I just don’t think the speed up will make them any less cooperative. So I looked back to February of 2022 to remember when they posted the announcement for Titan Final season part 2 and it looks like that schedule was revealed eight days before broadcast. I expect a similar lead up time for the announcement of the special episode. To think that Toonami was able to surprise announce Titan season 2 on April 1st 2017 right when the first episode of the sub dropped and 3 weeks prior to the dub premiere. Season 3 was announced for Toonami before it even started airing in Japan (but not before it was previewed overseas at AX and in theaters) and season 3 part 2 and the Final season part 1 were also announced for Toonami before the simulcast started. Now they can’t even give 2 week’s notice because CR doesn’t want anyone to know it will air on Toonami before it streams so we are left wondering if Toonami even has the rights to air it until just 8 days before it airs.

I don’t think CR cares that much about the MHA speed up. They had a long head start and surely didn’t lose potential viewers to Toonami that weren’t already willing to wait for Toonami. If anything they might have been a bit annoyed that they needed to have people translate and format the credits faster toward the end of the run when for months they had plenty of time to get that done before broadcast. But I also don’t think they encouraged Toonami to speed up to make room for something else.

To be fair Erina is fighting dozens of opponents at once and any depiction of that would sell the situation short so it’s probably better not to show the process. That and she never went up against the chefs that lost the prior challenges in the manga. By this point in the manga they haven’t shown what Erina was doing and it’s implied she didn’t have any challenges before the third gate. She also didn’t have so many chats with Asahi while watching contestants and I get the feeling they won’t have their conversation about his time with Joichiro because that material was repurposed and told at an earlier point. Erina didn’t watch Soma’s first challenge and I think the anime did her a bit dirty by having her come off as naive regarding what the old Noir chef would want. I guess they felt Asahi should be explaining things rather than the spiky haired Noir chef who took an interest in Soma. Good gravy Lanterby just straight up reached for her crotch. They’re not even trying to be clever at this point they’re just showing her in the act. They didn’t actually do that in the manga but they did have both the wardrobe malfunctions caused by Tsukasa and Soma. Someone at JC Staff just decided “this time let’s just have her slowly move her hand down from her throat to her crotch!” BTW you can thank the anime staff for introducing Lanterby in the first challenge because in the manga she wasn’t there till the second. More Lanterby is win for the anime watchers! Its fine that Soma lost the first attempt but the logic for why the first one was pathetic and his second one was incredible really doesn’t track. I suppose I shouldn’t expect consistency here. Likewise you could argue Tsukasa didn’t use every part of his ingredients so why is Soma looked down on for only using the jam of the bread? It seems like he used everything else he had for ingredients and theoretically there was some strawberry jam in a container somewhere in that store so the bread wasn’t even necessary but he did use the jam bread (for the jam) in the manga. There’s a lot in this arc that’s barely shown and I thought it was just that way in the anime but the manga didn’t show anything more from Megumi and Takumi’s challenges at the first gate so nothing more was seen of the baby food and dog/owner food challenges. So far the anime has added and changed several things. The beach event took place after Soma lost to Asahi and Erina was looking into Noir and having Totsuki affiliated chefs track them down before Asahi showed up. Asahi briefly kidnaps Erina during the beach exam and reveals his intentions then rather than show up in her bedroom some other night. That happened right after she had that nice moment with Soma on the balcony and made for quite a juxtaposition. Joichiro also showed up at the beach to talk to Soma about Asahi and The BLUE but that had to be reordered since they moved the beach exam to before Soma’s battle with Asahi. Making the beach exam the first episode of the season certainly messed with the flow a bit. I suppose it did keep Suzuki’s identity a mystery for a little bit longer and played up that angle but in turn they omitted Suzuki’s several attempts to princely court Erina before he revealed his true intentions. As for additions, there was no soup competition to decide the Totsuki participants for The BLUE. Soma, Megumi and Takumi were all invited directly. Maybe the anime staff felt the audience would want more of an explanation up front so they hastily threw in a short competition. I feel like it sorta undercuts why they are actually chosen but Toonami hasn’t gotten to the point where that becomes evident. Can you guess who the Book Master is? At this point I already was pretty sure and I was right. I haven’t be reading these threads because I just caught up so I don’t know if anybody else has sighted the differences between the anime and the manga for this arc. I hope I didn’t bore ya’ll with a needless wall of text. I do find the difference’s interesting so I wanted to talk about them.

I don’t even want to contemplate that they have nothing to fill 12:30 starting May 13th. They’ve had months to get something and even if they are saving a chunk of change for Bleach they’ve only bought Food Wars so far this year and surely have money for at least one more acquisition for the Summer. Hopefully it’s good. But if they’re banking on a quick turnaround for Dr. Stone season 3 for May 13th *nervous laughter*

If the 4/29 schedule includes the long episode of Attack on Titan (as it should) then Toonami won’t be able to announce it until Crunchyroll says the dub will stream 4/30. And since 5/6 will inevitably include the one hour encore of Unicorn: Warriors Eternal they’re going to take their time revealing the 5/13 schedule. They aren’t likely to post that schedule till Thursday the 27th or Friday the 28th. Best guess, at least the 4/29 schedule is confirmed on Friday the 21st and maybe also the 5/6 schedule. And if they still can’t air that Titan episode then it’ll be another stall tactic, possibly a DC movie or *shudders* more MHA reruns. It would be a good week to run the Dr. Stone TV special come to think of it.

I would imagine Amazon will prevent that for several years.

Even the Facebook post says it’s at Midnight *facepalm*

They are all assuredly different kinds of idiots but idiots just the same. The teenager is probably the least moronic. The Lawyer is maybe the best character but he also does some very stupid things. The board members are more rational than the family to an extent but they buy into Theo’s BS and clearly aren’t very sensible about a lot of things. Deb is cringe and clout chasing. Stebe is just sad. Theo is hard to like but he’s a somewhat entertaining asshat. Matt is just eh… a novelty voiced by Naruto. I suppose the humor comes from these idiots having bad things happen to them. At least none of their flawed personalities are projected to the audience as a good thing. If Rick & Morty is trying to make Rick seem like an irredeemable POS the writers need to quit sucking Rick’s balls almost every chance they can.

Of course they’re not going to get Howard Parker to record “at 12:30” for use in two promos. They probably could have spliced in “at 12:30” from another show promo in the past year but yeah the promo team probably didn’t get the memo. I don’t expect them to fix it next week and this late promo is proof enough they couldn’t air the last episode this week and maybe don’t even have it yet. In fairness to CR they have to make the credits roll for the episode and trim the OP and ED which they don’t have to do for the simuldub video and the episode just came out on Saturday. Toonami had no choice but to slow their roll but if that wasn’t plan A then you’ve gotta wonder what they were going to do to stall till May 6th for Unicorn. They were probably hoping for Titan a bit sooner but that would still leave a week with nothing for the first hour. So spacing out the last two episodes was probably was plan A as of when they set the date for Unicorn. I can rationalize not starting a new show two weeks before having to pre-empt for two weeks in a row but if they have nothing new to show in May besides a rerun from Thursdays… Then I might just lose my composure.

Stephanie Sheh is a regular and other VAs who worked on Naruto will appear in future episodes. Seems pretty evident its intentional but it's not like these actors aren't good for the job. They also have some more recognizable guest stars such as Fred Armisen and the late Gilbert Godfried so far. I've enjoyed the first 4 episodes though the factory one with the chickens was just kinda gross IMO. The way conversations play out really does remind me of Metalocalypse in a good way. I think it has potential.

They COULD do that and they should but for whatever reason they don't.

I do think part of the reason they rushed through about half of this MHA season was so they could rerun it. They can also rerun Titan and it would make sense to do so after the first special airs. But I’m not watching reruns after Shippuden regardless.

I don’t think we’ll get 11pm on May 6th unless they just shift up the 3 hours but may-be on May 27th in time for the 11th anniversary of the 2012 relaunch. DeMarco did say he was going to be most proud of that anniversary. If they expand on May 27th that’s probably when they start FLCL Grunge though I won’t rule out May 13th entirely because other originals have had less than a month of promotion but I’m leaning toward Grunge starting on that anniversary. But if it does start on May 13th they can run that till June 17th and maybe double up Unicorn for the finale so it finishes on June 24th and both series end before July 1st. Or on July 1st they finish UWE followed by a movie or a marathon. Here’s hoping for a good acquisition to take the 2nd slot on May 13th. It might even be Dr. Stone (hopefully starting with the TV special) as that will put it about a month behind the dub of season 3 if they ran the special on May 13th and start season 3 on May 20th (the dub starts on April 20th). It’s a more reasonable expectation that it could replace Food Wars or Grunge but who knows what they can pull off at this point? Since Superman is pegged for Summer, I fully expect it to replace Unicorn in July. If it’s 13 episodes, that should get them to October for Uzumaki and November for FLCL Shoegaze. If they don’t shift up they can pretty comfortably get by without Bleach thanks to Unicorn and Superman but if they shift up and especially if they expand, they had best have Bleach on deck by July. I also strongly suspect they’ll run Justice League: Flashpoint in June to promote The Flash.

I don't see lawmakers actually managing to break up WBD in any capacity but it sure would be something to see.

Strange choices but maybe with Naruto in particular they wanted to use bumps from a more interesting part of the show.

Shield Hero season 2 was a rather poor adaptation and if season 3 continues that trend then IMO Toonami dodged a bullet. And I’m speaking as someone who enjoyed season 1 enough to buy both Bluray sets.