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Sentai and Viz are still at the table and it sounds like (barring hiccups) they aren’t flying at the seat of their pants going into 2023. But they’re so short-staffed that everything including the process or getting shows is slower. I guess it’s time to start making “Gill Austin is killing Toonami” memes

Probably best not to assume anything but these delays certainly feel like interference from Sony. Maybe Toonami isn’t even allowed to run a promo or topicals but that would be next level petty. It might have been the case that season 6 was supposed to start last Saturday but there are other likely explanations for why the marathon got no promo, less than a week notice and no additional bumps. Such as Toonami trying to pivot to a Kevin Conroy tribute or simply being told not to waste effort on a marathon.

They must be trying their darndest to secure either MHA or Bleach but clearly they should have done something else for the time being until they could actually make that happen. Sacrifices in the middle of the year probably mainly came down to the budget freeze as opposed to just saving up for a big fish. Still they did manage to maintain 5-6 cable premieres most of the year even with their hands tied and they’re not having to resort to triple YashaHime like last December. But admittedly they would have looked way worse over the Summer without Primal encores and I honestly don’t know what else they would have done at the time so they’re lucky they were allowed to air it.

It’s honestly kind of unnecessary to promote a marathon of reruns even if it’s MHA which will feasibly do better than a regular lineup. The real question is did they make a bunch of additional bumpers for this marathon or will they mostly reuse the current ones? They had to at least make a bumper to say MHA is up next because they currently don’t have one of those.

Supposedly Aniplex gave them a real good deal on Durarara. I suspect Viz also gave them a good deal on Kekkaishi. No doubt they paid considerably more for FMA Brotherhood and in turn kept it for longer than 2 years. Before those three pick ups ASA had quite a dead period between 2008 and 2010. Just new episodes of Bleach and the rest of Moribito once Code Geass R2 wrapped. The avoided Funimation for whatever reason after One Piece and DBZ were pulled from Toonami. 2009 and 2011 were both years when it looked like ASA wasn’t long for this world.

So that MiA promo flat out lied, go figure. This is exactly what I expected to air if they didn’t run a Kevin Conroy tribute. They seem like they have season 6 but for whatever reason can’t say so directly. Why not just announce that along with this schedule? But I can see them saving that for a post on Wednesday or an on-air promo.

I’ve asked Maki about it personally and I trust her when she says they’ve been working diligently on Uzumaki. She also mentioned the studio is animating it with a technique that unlike anything that’s ever been done before.

Regardless of when it's finished, it won't air until October almost guaranteed. In June they'll probably be airing the 2nd of the two seasons of FLCL with the first airing in February or March. At the very least they are putting tremendous effort into translating Junji Ito's detailed art into animation which was a huge problem for the Junji Ito Collection. That won't assure the story will adapt well into 4 episodes of TV anime but it's certainly better than it looking as shoddy and campy as the Collection. It will be tremendously difficult to live up to 4 years+ of development but it is what it is.

Yeah they ran a toyetic anime but they must have had no interest in DBS over on the CN side, otherwise Toei would have given it to CN in a heart beat. It's going to be interesting to see what Toei decides to do with future DB series there's really no telling what could happen with the way the market is constantly changing.

Simply having the Junji Ito show sooner doesn't mean it's gonna be good. The Junji Ito Collection was pretty awful. But yeah Uzumaki could get shelved before completion and in that case Netflix wins by default.

That would be horrendous. They could certainly do a Punk Hazard marathon of One Piece. Run a whole season of FLCL. Run 6 episodes of GITS, Bebop or Attack on Titan. They still have most of Black Clover on the app so maybe they can still air that. And if MHA season 6 is actually coming then I figured plan A was to rerun the whole villain arc that night even if that’s redundant.

I think it didn’t take even a year for Adult Swim to prove to Toei that 11pm and even midnight on a Saturday was a better time slot than 8pm.

I’m rather surprised Fena wasn’t union but I suppose NYAV Post does non-union too. Chock this up to another anti-union move from Crunchyroll.

I don’t think Crunchyroll can tighten the door on Toei shows as long as Toei holds the streaming rights (and broadcast rights) which they do in most cases. One Piece, Kai, Super and potentially any future Dragon Ball series won’t get locked down unless Toei lets Crunchyroll have those rights exclusively and I foresee Toei continuing to be too hands on to do that. However, it’s only sensible at this point to operate under the expectation that nothing is certain. If MHA season 6 comes then it’s a good prospect but not a guarantee other prior licenses will return (Dr. Stone, Fire Force) and Crunchyroll can make them as expensive as they want to if not outright refuse them unless a Japanese company forces them to cooperate.

American Dad and Rick & Morty got 0.185 18-49 and above 350k each on November 5th before Toonami. That’s probably the best Saturday those shows have had since September.

Grexeno on the Toonami Escape Podcast had a reasonable theory. Toei only wanted them to double up One Piece until Film Red hit theaters. It’s otherwise rather odd that double OP ended right when Film Red hit theaters. Though honestly my best guess is Toonami initially bought to the end of Punk Hazard and aren’t certain what 2023’s budget will permit so they don’t want to blow through the rest when things remain in flux. Either that or they were only doing double One Piece for as long as they had 4 hours to fill and they were finally told to scale back so they feel less obligated to fill 2:30 with a premiere. I feel like they doubled it up to give it the best shot they could to see if it could be a mainstay again but now that they’ve seen it’s modest performance doesn’t look capable of growing much, they have to consider if buying 100ish episodes of Dressrosa is worth the commitment. I certainly hope Toei didn’t just jack up the price because of Film Red actually doing respectable in theaters here but I suppose I would not rule that out.

Cancer claims another great. It never gets any easier to stomach how easily a life can end. It’s going to take time to process this.

How dare they! It was a web NOVEL.

They didn’t test this with a living human right?

No premieres below 0.09 or 186k? Primal probably didn’t drop much from Shippuden either so that makes for a very respectable 3 hours.

Yeah that’s true the original statement was from Pridemore and Todd poorly defended himself while also throwing Vic under the bus because he was aware of Vic’s interactions with Pridemore. I don’t recall seeing Todd apologizing but I definitely saw him claiming it was between consenting adults. If he did apologize then that probably did help avoid career assassination. They did use Blake Shepard a ton for a while. They seem to have dialed that back but as for why Shepard didn’t get as much flack? Probably because not as many people paid attention to Sentai dubs. Before him it was all Chris Patton and Greg Ayres at ADV.

Cuts will continue until morale has improved. - Zaslav probably

There’s already been 3 other SAO movies that Toonami hasn’t aired (not that the 3rd one is even in the US yet) so that was true for a while.

Todd was slinging extra mud at Vic and outted himself as a sexual predator in the process. Though it’s a “he said, she said” situation and he claims the sex he had with a fan at a convention was consensual, the woman feels quite the opposite and has some witnesses who Todd also tried to drag into the mud. Unlike Vic he didn’t try to sue for defamation but interestingly he did supposedly seek legal council from Vic’s lawyer. An odd thing to do after trying to make Vic look even worse. So some studios seem to be avoiding Todd but he’s still in SAG-AFTRA and he gets roles in many LA dubs. Vic probably would still be Ikkaku if he hadn’t tried to sue FUNimation but now no major studio will hire him.

Oh he was in it. He played the creep that bought Fena’s first service at the brothel. He was recast and never credited but the difference between his admittedly great performance and Robbie Daymond’s is quite obvious to me. Current digital versions have Daymond but the original broadcast didn’t until episode 3. Daymond was credited for all his appearances but it was definitely not Daymond in episode 1. You can also hear Haberkorn in the episode 3 promo and Daymond’s performance is quite different. Good on them for recasting and even re-recording but Haberkorn surely still got paid and casting him at all was quite an oversight.