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Blade Runner as a franchise never did well in theaters, though that's not saying much since it only had two movies in theaters. It did however do decently well on home video and developed a lot of nerd cred over the years as subsequent rereleases of the original film were made to get closer to Ridley Scott's vision. The Final Cut apparently wasn't even made until 25 years after the original film but even that original film which bombed against E.T. in theaters went on to influence countless sci-fi properties and particularly anime like Ghost in the Shell and Bubblegum Crisis. Both films have a lot more critical acclaim than box office success but have reached a decently wide audience through home video and good word of mouth. I'd say throwing money at a Blade Runner anime at least makes more sense than banking on Schenmue or Uzumaki but not by much. I think they're trying to appeal to sci-fi fans and existing fans of the franchise while not straight up alienating their core demographic which mostly likes shounen fantasy anime. To be fair, Ghost in the Shell did well for Adult Swim for many years and while it's been over 15 years since GITS SAC premiered its been able to rerun on the backend with moderate success from time to time. I think a brand new cyberpunk anime could potentially do well for Toonami and it probably doesn't hurt that it's set in the universe of a existing franchise. At least I hope it doesn't. It is not likely essential to watch the original film or the sequel to enjoy Blade Runner: Black Lotus so I hope the fact that it is set in that universe doesn't make viewers avoid it. This is certainly a gamble but nothing ventured nothing gained, as they say. At the very least it will be a dub that is exclusive to Toonami and Toonami probably gets to show it (any version) before any other network or service in the world.

Many have argued it's stranger for Rick & Morty anime shorts to premiere on Toonami but I'm okay with it one way or the other. This one will encore the same Saturday as the Harley Quinn marathon but it will do so in prime time.

They probably reached out to Adult Swim or maybe DeMarco directly because they were aware that AS aired animated music videos.

It’s pretty good looking CG, so I’m a lot less worried now. That recent GITS by the same guys had me really concerned how this would turn out. Story seems interesting enough. I’m all the more excited to see this.

Wearing a mask has help make my allergies quite a bit more tolerable this year. So that’s nice.

Probably Blade Runner but maybe Fena.

Wait what?

My mistake, I was looking at a different Facebook post. The original post still lists an hour premiere.

The Toonami Facebook post mentions a 1 hour premiere. EDIT: Actually the post got edited and no longer mentions that but the ANN article does note the hour premiere. So maybe that plan has already changed, dunno.

So it’s a one hour premiere at midnight.I wonder how the rest of the schedule will look. I’m thinking MHA will actually take that week off due to FUNimation recently taking a week off but we’ll get another premiere at 1:30am or maybe 1am bumping YashaHime to 1:30. Probably MegaloBox or Assassination Classroom. Though airing MHA at 1am or even 11:30 on August 14th isn’t out of the realm of possibility. As AL said, the schedule will be extra long the week before so maybe Toonami will get a proper expansion on August 14th. Or maybe just an earlier start time with shows shifting up.

Probably was a bad idea to mention the strike here but geez that’s overkill. And phooey to whoever snitched.

So Toonami gets to catch up by a week. I call that a win.

Iron Maiden on Toonami. I never expected that but it is pretty rad.

As a bus driver in a city 30 minutes north of Seattle, I think I see more anime shirts and accessories than super hero ones but it’s pretty close.

I was at a department store the other day similar to Kohls and saw MHA, DBZ, Naruto, Bleach and Attack on Titan shirts. Sorry CountFrylock I guess I didn’t pay enough attention to your initial post. I’m also sorry that name dropping the particular user probably brought out the mods wrath. I see things are much the same over there still. I guess it is a bit rude to get a second opinion about your ongoing debate on another public forum but hardly worth an infraction on any kind. If someone snitched on us here, I wonder if they ever found TZWatch? 🤣

So I lurked the Toonami news thread on the site formally known as ToonZone and now see where this conversation originated. Here I had thought CountFrylock was having this discussion with some IRL friend. Well I’m not coming out of TZ retirement to debate with Picard Man over there. He’s allowed his opinion and that opinion is allowed to be misguided. The world has changed since he got out of high school.

I wonder if this will actually be the Adult Swim premiere of Harley Quinn or if they'll maybe toss it on weeknights shortly before this. I suppose that might make the Toonami marathon kind of pointless but I'm at least a little surprised that this would have it's network premiere on Toonami rather than on Sunday or weeknights on Adult Swim.

Your friend seems to be entrenched in the history of stigmatization of anime and is also too hung up on ratings. Both anime and super hero content is way more mainstream now than it was in Toonami's hey day and Naruto Shippuden has been one of the top performing shows on Hulu for like a decade now. Manga is kicking the ass of American comics in graphic novel sales. Some anime are regularly in the top 10 for Netflix and as JMan mentioned all the serious animated series on Netflix are labelled as anime because that marketing works. Sure those DC movies had some of the best ratings Toonami had last year but they were 3 weeks out of an entire year, if they ran DC movies every week they probably wouldn't be as heavily watched because they're not something outside of the norm and last year's Toonami was mostly reruns due to COVID-19 so its not a good way to judge the success of those movies. If Harley Quinn outrates a regular night of Toonami this year then maybe your friend isn't entirely wrong but that remains to be seen. But even then that's judging DC content against just what's on Toonami right now and MHA is the only show on Toonami right now that's a BIG hit aside from DBS and Titan which are reruns that are rightfully buried at 3am. Well there's also Naruto which is still popular but the point is most of the shows after MHA aren't all that popular and Toonami is getting them after they have streamed. But Toonami also doesn't have much in the way of stuff you can't see easier elsewhere so they're kind of missing big hits and hidden gems that can appeal to more people. DC animated films are probably an easier sell than a lot of anime but not stuff like MHA and Dragon Ball Z.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

It isn't actually. They ran a handful of episodes on TBS one night (to a collective, why the fuck isn't this on Adult Swim?) and Syfy ran the entire first season (but not the 2nd, that's exclusive to HBO Max currently). TBS censored it for language (to be expected) but Syfy actually ran it uncensored, the gave all the fucks. With adequate promotion this will surely do better on Toonami than it did on TBS, much less Syfy but Syfy still one-ups Adult Swim by airing it with all the fucks. Adult Swim still isn't allowed uncensored fucks and probably never will because it shares space with Cartoon Network.

DC shows played a substantial role in the success of Toonami on CN. Particularly Teen Titans on Saturday night Toonami but that eventually lost it's crown to Naruto. Batman, Superman and Batman Beyond got a lot of play on weekday Toonami and Justice League ran a bit (all of JLU premiered on Saturday Toonami but it was gone by 2006) and The Batman only aired about a season and a half before Toonami never bothered with it again and it was sent to Boomerang. I don't think any of those shows actually matched DBZ in performance on Toonami but they probably did better than some anime. Beware the Batman did pretty dang well on Toonami at 3am and then 2:30am. Had they put it in a decent time slot it probably would have done better than everything on at the time except Attack on Titan, Bleach and maybe Naruto Shippuden. Back in 2012, 2013 or even 2014 Young Justice likely would have done quite well for Toonami, at least as well as ThunderCats 2011 did. But it's been close to a decade since then and the series streamed on Netflix for a while. It doesn't seem to be quite as evergreen as Avatar the Last Airbender or Naruto (Naruto was seriously in the top 10 Netflix shows for kids this last year). If it was put on Toonami now it would likely do better than most anime but I doubt it would do more than about 250-300k most weeks. The DC movie nights were three of the best rated nights for Toonami in 2020. Harley Quinn will be a good test to see if something that's been streamed on HBO Max and aired on Syfy (and one night on TBS) can do well on Toonami. I'm hopeful it can do well and if that's the case then maybe Young Justice could also do well. That said, unless they dig into stuff from the 90s into the 2000s, there's not many DC shows they can feasibly air. Harley Quinn and Young Justice are the only ones with a decent amount of episodes that are still in production. The upcoming Batman show might work though, it seems to be targeting a wider age range. Some folks would certainly love to see the likes of Batman: TAS or Justice League air regardless of how old they are and most of those shows have an HD version that could air but I honestly don't know how well those would do. DBZ does well largely because of nostalgia so maybe Batman could as well? It's not the worst idea. I'd very much welcome some old DC shows into the back-end of the block but Harley Quinn and Young Justice would be plenty of DC content for now if animated movies aren't on the table. Speaking of movies... I think it would be pretty great if they were to run DC animated films in prime time-either before or as part of an extended Toonami. DC films might be just the thing to draw people to Saturday once Family Guy leaves. I'd love to see them try that but it would be tremendously generous of WarnerMedia to let Adult Swim run a bunch of those movies. It would be a really good way to prop up Blade Runner: Black Lotus though.

Well that's an interesting development. Acceptable shilling for Suicide Squad. At first I was like "but why do a marathon that night?" then I was like "oh right, that movie comes out then" That all but assures that Food Wars is taking a break. Clover gets a few weeks off to help FUNi build up a bigger buffer and MHA doesn't skip a week and fall further behind FUNi, so that all works out nicely. Hopefully we got good stuff coming on August 14th for a possible double premiere but a marathon of block premieres is a nice change of pace. I've only seen 3 episodes of Harley Quinn so most of that is new to me. It's sure to be censored for f-bombs but I think the rest of the language is allowed on Adult Swim and the violence should be fine. Strong possibility for Fena on August 14th and as for the other show it probably a sequel or spin-off of something that's already aired. I'm leaning toward AssClass but maybe it's Megalobox. Seems too soon for Dynazenon if that's even on their radar. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's something much less expected like Vinland Saga or Akudama Drive or something. Oh and there's always the possibility of Mob season 2 or Jujutsu Kaisen if they can work out deals for those now.

FUNimation, Crunchyroll and Hulu all have the dub and sub I believe. The dub started about two months into the Japanese broadcast.

It’s the nature of a casual viewer but also consider this scenario, someone likes MHA and maybe Dr. Stone but they tune in at 11pm and see Black Dynamite is airing instead of Family Guy and decide to just record the anime to watch later rather than come back in an hour. When the routine is messed with they might just say f it and do something else rather than come back. Casual viewers are fickle like that.

I got you fam