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Common beliefs among Toonami critics: 1) Jason DeMarco has "old man" taste and doesn't look at anything new that isn't a popular shounen and he programs Toonami like his own personal MyAnimeList 2) Jason DeMarco, Gill Austin and Kim Manning wait till the last minute to pick shows whenever there's an opening on the horizon 3) When the popular shounen aren't available, Toonami's management would rather pick up nothing than go outside of their comfort zone 4) When Toonami was loading up with long runners they were missing opportunities to get other shows I don't think Jason's statements here will be nearly enough to persuade Toonami critics because many will just say he's lying but he can't be much more transparent about the process than that. They do regularly discuss what shows to get for Toonami and DeMarco does look a new anime that aren't shounen. In the past he's mentioned that they were unable to get KonoSuba, Shield Hero, The Ancient Magus Bride, Fairy Tale and Yuri on Ice among other shows. Who knows what other shows they wanted to get that they couldn't? I'm not sure what's a more distressing thought.. that Toonami wasn't interested in Blood Blockade Battlefront or that they wanted to get it but they couldn't. Why then could all those big shounen air on Toonami? My theory is the companies involved (primarily the Japanese ones) wanted those shows on television most of all but they did have wait things out a bit for My Hero Academia despite that. Gundam and Lupin happened for similar reasons. Aniplex brought Neverland and Demon Slayer to the table because at the time Toonami had proven a successful partner with SAO, Kill la Kill and other series. Perhaps they felt burned from their exclusive deals with Hulu and Netflix and still considered Toonami a good partner in 2019 but now feel otherwise. After Neon Alley didn't pan out, in 2016 and 2018 Viz went all in on Toonami with the exception of Sailor Moon (which Toonami also wanted). I'm not sure why Toonami couldn't get YashaHime sooner but from the sound of it, Toonami would have gotten JoJo's Stone Ocean if Netflix hadn't butted in. So while Toonami was considering Made in Abyss, SSSS.Gridman and Assassination Classroom some time earlier than they got them, other opportunities swayed their hand. We know Adult Swim has always run it's network "on the cheap" so with the exception of already huge titles like Attack on Titan (first season), DBZ Kai, DBS and My Hero Academia (in 2018) they probably got rather good deals on the shows they did air. So a serious problem Toonami could very well be facing now is that Sony has no interest in cutting them a deal for anything and the amount of money that might have sustained Toonami in prior years isn't enough to get as many shows now because the costs have gone up across the board. It might actually be becoming more affordable to make new shows than to borrow shows from licensors. It is evidently more affordable to make a new show than to license and dub an existing one according to DeMarco. I suppose that makes sense, you can set the budget of your own project but when you license a show from a Japanese company they can put whatever price they want to on it. I do not envy their position and I'm not surprise they're "basically giving up" on trying to make Toonami fans "happy" because a sizable portion want the focus to stay on big shounen like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer and the fans who have grown tired of the shounen onslaught want to see anything but more shounen. Its difficult to find a balance there especially when the shounen fans are much more vocal on Facebook and Twitter and the shounen haters mostly vent their frustrations on 4chan. They're probably better off not worrying about appeasing either faction. I'm sure they see the merits in having a variety of programming but it doesn't always work out that way. I sure would love to listen in on even one of those conversations they have about potential show pick-ups.

InstaSnapTok or something… yeah that what the kids like.

It’s probably around 25-30% of what it was in 2017. So I guess we could formulate from that.

That’s an interesting idea. What sorts of things could they do?

Primal has done it again! 0.15 18-49 and 325,000 total viewers. Seems like as underwhelming as Toonami is right now, it’s doing more than fine. Nothing below 100k.

I hope they both have a swift recovery with no long term damage. This is why conventions should not be in person for a while longer.

Probably Food Wars or YashaHime but maybe another Sentai series. They are currently dubbing The Executioner and Her Way of Life and Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, they'd be fresh dubs that would be nice to have on the block. Executioner wouldn't be a dub premiere but maybe Kaiji could be. A safer pick from Sentai would be the shounen adventure series Ushio & Tora if they are even aware of it.

They should totally let Sentai Studios try a terrible approximation of Roiland's voices.

Been a while since they ran a Crunchyroll service ad during Toonami but a you said about movies, last month they bought a lot of ad-space to promote Jujutsu Kaisen 0's theatrical run. I wouldn't put it past them to run an ad for Spy x Family or other CR licenses soon.

CR buys ad space on Toonami from time to time. It’s not like Disney puts their Marvel series on FX. Amazon and Netflix don’t like to share their originals with cable either.

According to DeMarco Rick & Morty: The Anime will air subbed. Now that’s a bold choice.

Thanks for looking into the 18-49s. Colt’s chart stopped listing those at some point so I was only seeing the total viewers and basing it on that but those don’t always correlate.

One could argue the bigger Toonami news here is that they got the director of Jujitsu Kaisen on tap for an original ninja anime. When Crunchyroll cock blocks you from a big show, just get the director to make you a show instead. It might have actually been CR people who introduced DeMarco to Sunghoo Park and Takashi Sano. Though Sano is a professed Rick & Morty super fan. So perhaps the CR relationship had some lasting value for Toonami after all.

There's been something kinda off about Ruff's Fujiko this season. I don't remember thinking the voice sounded off in prior parts but its definitely bothering me in this one.

Honestly it might be my favorite episode of Lupin in general. The hard-boiled film noir discussion was so captivating that before I knew it the episode was already over.

Primal got 0.14 and 287,000 Let me put that into perspective. A rerun of Primal episode 1 did better than 6 episodes of Fena after Family Guy left Saturday, all of Black Lotus and all but 1 episode of Shenmue the Animation. At least in total viewers if not also 18-49. I’m frankly shocked. It might be a fluke but if this keeps up then maybe Primal reruns actually do interest more people than the anime on Toonami does.

More “wonderful” news… Crunchyroll got Chainsaw Man. Well, at least it didn’t go to Netflix but it’s still very unlikely that it will air on Toonami.

It's always been a bit puzzling why Crunchyroll seemingly doesn't want to lend shows to Toonami. The people that founded Crunchyroll and various staff have sung the praises of Toonami but it looks more and more like Crunchyroll wouldn't have partnered with Toonami if not for AT&T buying Time Warner. Time Warner was notorious for its lack of synergy, so while it made no freak'n sense that Warner's DC content was out of Adult Swim's reach it became the expectation when DeMarco made it clear they couldn't afford Young Justice or older DC series. Likewise, Crunchyroll even under WarnerMedia didn't want to do Toonami a solid unless it was a co-production that both Adult Swim and Crunchyroll helped fund. But it's somehow an entirely different story in Latin America where Crunchyroll continues to provide programming for the small nightly Toonami block over there. On the WarnerMedia side they wanted to make use of the Crunchyroll catalog for HBO Max and that may or may not have kept those shows off of Toonami. Warner could have really done Toonami a solid and let them run Harley Quinn season 2 instead of Primal reruns but that clearly didn't happen. It's not as if FUNimation hasn't played hard ball from time to time but I was really hoping that the merger with Crunchyroll would mean more CR titles would be on the table. Thus far it looks like the opposite has occurred. However, that might not be the sole or even primary reason for the drought in new content right now. The real issue could very well be Toonami's acquisition budget getting even tighter but on the other hand, I don't think they would have turned to double One Piece if money was the primary reason why they couldn't get shows from the FUNimation catalog right now. Whether its a lack of budget or a lack of viable options, things aren't looking great right now. All that said, I do think they will replace Ass Class with new content in June but I don't think they'll add more than 2 or 3 more acquisitions this year. And regarding Mob, I think I'll finally stop putting off watching season 2. I hear it's better than the first season but up until now I've lacked the motivation to watch it at my leisure because I didn't watch the simulcast when it was the talk of the town.

He's probably also saying there's still people out there that see a value in Toonami or at least implying that there should be.

Yeah the two burly newkama that nursed Sanji back to health and gave him blood transfusions are shown at the end of the lineup promo. BTW, they fixed the lineup promo to say Toonami is 12am-4am rather than 12am-3:30am. They also got the time right on the Ass Class promo this week, 12:30am instead of Midnight.

They took some subtle jabs at Netflix Bebop in the marathon promo back in January. At least that’s how the dialogue read to some. But they didn’t go full Jake Long on it.

As much as I dislike the newkama jokes in One Piece, the “up all night” line certainly works in context. Perhaps they could have spliced the dialogue with a different scene though.

Truthfully, TBS and TNT have been winding down on scripted shows for a while now but they WarnerDiscovery must really be intending to pivot both networks to include more live sports, unscripted tv series and movies on top of syndicated reruns of comedies on TBS and dramas on TNT to fill the day hours. Scripted live action series will be made almost exclusively for HBO Max. American Dad has a few more seasons under contract at TBS but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't renewed again. Hard to say if that culling of departments will bleed into Adult Swim but on the Cartoon Network side they just announced a couple more series in development so maybe the Adult Swim upfront later this month will put those concerns to bed.

Yeah... calling out Sony was not a good idea. Not doing so might not have improved the situation but doing so assuredly didn't help. DeMarco has never called the big shots at Adult Swim and now he's probably even less involved with the decisions pertaining Toonami outside of original productions but he does come off as a guy who will pass the blame when things go south and accept any praise lofted at Toonami. And he often rides a fine line between not trashing the management and not taking responsibility for mistakes until they are water under the bridge.

"Talented people are capable of understanding us" is a quote from Gundam Wing that was used in the Toonami music video titled "Space is the Place" He's making a nod to that.