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I'm all for that. They really should give C. Martin Croker a day as well. That's the least they could do for him now.

I keep seeing this narrative that DeMarco didn't know what he was getting into with Food Wars but he talked about liking Food Wars during Toonami Pre-Flight. So I'm pretty sure he knew about the foodgasms and felt the show still had merit. What he wasn't aware of, at the time, was that Food Wars was dubbed. The show might have popped up on Toonami a bit sooner if he and Gill had known it was already dubbed. It's entirely possible it was still a last minute replacement show despite that but I honestly don't think he's having buyers remorse or anything. I also figure that they grabbed Food Wars because it could fill a slot for a while. Fire Force though? I wouldn't doubt that he had not seen more than maybe an episode or two before grabbing it. Probably the same goes for Dr. Stone and Demon Slayer.

But that's where the statement "it wasn't us" isn't quite specific enough. Because he could be saying the Toonami editors didn't touch Fire Force (because they don't edit for content in general) but he could also be saying Adult Swim S&P didn't edit Fire Force. Because he wasn't specific with "us" it's not certain if he responding to the question from the perspective of "Toonami doesn't edit, it wasn't us" or from the perspective of "Adult Swim S&P didn't edit it, ergo it had to be FUNimation that did it". He could be saying two very different things with that response. So it feels like he's avoiding giving a clear-cut answer but maybe he just thought "it wasn't us" was an adequate reply that assumed people already understood Toonami editors don't edit the shows for content. Which would mean he's saying FUNimation made the edits.

Given FUNimation's tendency to ignore Toonami's existence with regards to "premieres", Toonami may still get to air episode 131 before this panel, specifically the night before on October 5th. Though I won't rule out the possibility that Toonami will have to delay Super a week. Owl's theory regarding Toonami losing an hour for Pete Smith Day may ring true. I kinda want them to do that. 4 hours of Bob's Burgers leading into a Toonami that starts with Dr. Stone? I'm all for it. Alternatively they could buy time by preempting 11-12AM on September 28th and double up DBS on October 5th. Then the week after they can start Demon Slayer and maybe another new show or a same day dub of My Hero Academia season 4. There's a handful of options that are plausible.

They actually are not. The Toonami crew and Adult Swim’s standards department are not the same people. Content is looked over by S&P and edited by them S&P’s video editors if necessary.

The lesson that HxH and JoJo may have taught us is being a dub premiere doesn't mean much when the episodes simulcast in Japanese years ago. Boruto is kind of proving that as well but less so than those two did. Food Wars is a curious situation because it's been dubbed for years now but it's doing pretty well for itself despite that. So clearly being a fresh dub isn't everything. Toonami has traded in having more dub premieres for having new dubs that are just weeks behind the Japanese airing and the English simuldub. As people grow more and more accustomed to subbed anime, waiting for dubs will make less and less sense. So unless that show is dubbed pronto, more and more viewers will just watch the simulcasts subbed to stay up to date and take part in the conversation. While dub premieres are great for us dedicated viewers who might have the patience to wait for dubs, they're not that attractive to viewers who could just watch the subs. And the viewers who benefit the most from this change in direction are those who don't have reliable internet connections that would allow them to watch the simuldub streams of shows like Dr. Stone and Fire Force and not have to wait a year or later to finally watch those. Theoretically the combination of fast dub and hype action show should work well for Toonami and hopefully it does in Demon Slayer's case but being a dub premiere didn't convince people to watch The Promised Neverland, Lupin Part 5 and some other shows that were not loaded with action. So being a good fit with the audience matters more than whether or not the dub is available elsewhere because as I mentioned earlier, people will watch the sub. Lots of people won't even wait 1 week for a dub if the sub is available sooner. So the winning combination likely includes some dub premieres that aren't airing long after they ran in Japan and some lightly used dubs of shows that are popular in the current season, if they appeal to the audience. World premieres factor in there somewhere because it gives people the most reason to tune in but the shows have to appeal to the audience enough that they will bother to tune in. If they don't care enough to watch the night they air or they don't care to watch them at all then an exclusive world premiere isn't accomplishing much. Uzumaki is way outside Toonami's regular box but who knows, maybe it can attract new viewers. Good luck keeping those viewers if it's literally the only thing in the same tone on the block though.

Oh it's actually 11 minute episodes? Interesting. They will probably rate them individually just as most AS originals filling two slots in a half hour tend to be.

It's not that uncommon for Adult Swim to premiere a mini series on a weeknight strip. They did it for The Heart, She Holler and Neon Joe: Were-Wolf Hunter. Primal is probably written as a 5 piece story that Genndy wanted to it to play out over a week.

A Boruto episode... seriously? And Dr. Stone definitely did not need a TV-MA. Some episodes of Food Wars (uncensored) should have a TV-MA rating but not every single episode much less episodes that are edited for content. I guess I’d rather have MA rated episodes than censored ones so if MA is what it takes to air Food Wars without more edits, then so be it.

Some services let you record a show along with an hour before that show and up to two hours after it. Cloud DVRs for PS Vue, Hulu, etc don’t let you do that.

I’m gonna figure Viz stipulated that Megalobox be pulled shortly after it finished because the Blu-ray set was coming out. It would be a shame if Toonami never reran it but maybe Viz will let them play it again some day.

S&P is handling Food Wars but it is possible that FUNimation edited that episode of Fire Force without Toonami’s knowledge or request. Surely we haven’t forgotten that one time they played an MHA episode that had All Might’s dialogue censored and different than what streamed? Sometimes FUNimation gets overzealous with editing stuff for TV despite Toonami being on Adult Swim now. And other times they just flat send the wrong version of an episode. It is also possible that S&P did the edits as they did with Food Wars and Jason just means the Toonami team did not do the edits. But due to his uninformative answer, we may never know. If the censorship doesn’t persist then it was more likely FUNimation and Adult Swim informed them that such edits aren’t necessary. If it continues to be edited then it either is AS S&P or they requested FUNimation to continue editing Tamaki’s compromising moments.

A rock solid pickup. Hopefully it does well.

But you didn’t tag him.

TOM interviewing David Tenant would be amazing. I would be amused if they had TOM interview Michael B. Jordan as well.

Despite airing off and on since October 2016. I get the impression that a lot of people were not even aware that JoJo has been on Adult Swim on Saturday nights. Even a brief pop-up on Netflix seems to catch more attention than a lineup promo from Toonami. Though I’m not honestly convinced that each episode of JoJo was watched by even a million unique subscribers on Netflix. If it could manage even 600,000 then it’s doing comparable numbers to Stardust’s better days on Toonami but below the 800,000-1 Million Part 1 was able to get in late 2016. Yes I do believe a show can trend on Netflix without getting even a million subscribers to check it out. I figure most anime on Netflix are lucky to get 300,000 per episode while a select few can get close to double that and most get less than 200,000. That looks pretty good compared to Toonami now but given the amount of subscribers Netflix has it’s a rather small percentage of their total audience. I’m partially basing that theory on how many views popular shows get on certain pirate sites but I’d like to believe the pirate numbers have decreased a bit due to the ease of watching anime legally now. Call me crazy but I’d figure those FLCL sequels did comparable numbers to some of the more lauded Netflix exclusive anime. Maybe not Aggretsuko, Seven Deadly Sins or Devil Man Cry Baby though. Those three definitely caught on with the wider audience. People still don’t know Toonami is on and has been back for over seven years. They should really advertise on YouTube a lot more than they have and advertise on other networks. CR’s free player is loaded with redundant ads, Toonami should advertise on CR for sure. After all, CR advertises during Toonami.

I tend to consider the shift toward long-runners to be caused by several factors. 1) Viz wanted HxH, JoJo and eventually Boruto on TV. Before those came along, Toonami already had DBZ, Naruto, One Piece and had finished Bleach. Fairy Tail was pretty much the only 200+ episode fighting shounen they had ignored. And it basically still is because only part of Gintama and others got dubbed. 2) Constantly picking new shows was becoming problematic so they felt more long series and series with multiple iterations could lighten that load. They likely felt they could never maintain more than 6 premieres at a time unless they got more long runners. 3) DBZ Kai was only ever matched by One-Punch Man so they thought shows cut from the same cloth as DBZ and Naruto would definitely do well and better than the 4) They just plain like DBS, HxH, JoJo, Gundam, Lupin, Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia among others. 5) DBZ Kai was so popular that not airing Super or even the Buu saga of Kai wasn’t even questioned and Toei wanted them on TV. So they didn’t see any issue with airing Buu Kai and Super at the same time. And possibly one of the biggest factors aside from what the distributors wanted was simply this: 6) No matter how many long series and sequel series Toonami was airing, fans kept asking for more of the same. They let that guide their choices more than they probably should have. Because of that, some people genuinely believe Toonami is only for shounen fans now and that it turned its back on seinin fans in 2016. Those folks argue that if Toonami had ignored the demand for every long runner and stuck to a schedule like it had in 2014 and 2015, that Toonami would be doing significantly better now. They feel the decision to keep a largely consistent schedule full of JUMP shounen headlined by DBS, pushed loyal viewers away out of boredom and frustration. They might be at least partially right. Though I don’t think a schedule like the one they had in 2015 would have done better (or worse) than what we had from 2016 till today. Maybe a little if only by the nature of diminishing returns from sequels and continuations. Even DBS has sank considerably from where it started in early 2017 so of course JoJo and HxH would as well. Alas, we will never know for sure.

The time slot does not matter between 10pm and 5am and especially not between midnight and 1am.

Makes me question if they could air InuYasha episodes still without censoring Miroku.

While 1.8 million is astounding for any show even back in 2015, we all know AgK could not have pulled that off if DBZ Kai didn’t break 2 million that night. It held DBZ pretty well throughout its run, that’s about all anyone could ask. One-Punch Man remains the only anime to one-up it’s DBZ lead and it definitely didn’t manage that for fan service. That said, Food Wars is showing nice gains and stable performance despite being a slightly old dub that is streaming on Hulu. That is definitely showing the potential for fan service heavy shows right now. We’ll see if Fire Force manages the same.

Well, at least it’s not ahead of the Toonami airing. But ya know we have all this talk of streaming killing shows for Toonami, yet Food Wars which is all on Hulu is doing pretty well for itself. It’s a bit curious.

It was only a matter of time.

It also had those but it definitely had manservice.

Actively avoiding manservice? The man brought in JoJo. 🤨 There’s manservice in Food Wars tonight as well.

I linked to a tweet where FUNi announced that their upload of the dub would resume on Friday. I hear Fire Force was originally intended for Spring so the production of the anime and the dub have episodes in the can already. Same day simuldubs wouldn’t really be possible if FUNi didn’t have a buffer of completed episodes.