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Gundam Unicorn at 9:30 would get like 300,000 viewers IF THAT and probably lose 200,000 or more from DBZ.

Yeah those are a lot of big changes to do all at once but the majority of them do make sense. They gradually build to DBS with DBZ Kai reruns, My Hero Academia, Shippuden and Boruto. Shippuden is always a draw so that hour is probably gonna do alright and MHA gets the benefit of a Kai lead though it'll be hard pressed to do well at 9:30PM. They smartly have FLCL the biggest investment, right after Dragon Ball Super. Titan has already proven it's not terrific at holding DBS (it's not terrible though) so it's not a bad idea to try this. I haven't watched much of Black Clover and I have no investment in it but it has edged out HxH and even JoJo a few times lately so it's promotion isn't unwarranted. HxH ends next July and it's unlikely to gain new viewers 2 years into it's run so moving it back to 1:30AM where it has aired before isn't so bad. The only thing that stings is the fact that it is the last premiere of the night. It's been years since 1:30AM was the last premiere of the night though. I think they'll initially rerun Jack's 5th at 3:30AM but it'd be great if they ran the whole series with the HD remaster. Five rerun slots is a lot, especially the four in the back, but 2AM premieres don't seem sensible when the block starts at 9PM and already has 9 premieres. This is way too much Toonami for me to consider watching even if I was home to do so but as it stands I won't be home for the west coast airing until Boruto or Super and I have no reason to DVR anything before Boruto but I might DVR MHA to rewatch when Clover is on. I wouldn't mind if comedy took the 3AM hour if they would do something interesting with it. The current post-Toonami schedule of The Boondocks, Mike Tyson Mysteries and an hour of Home Movies is a pretty good start. I expect the 8pm hour will just be back to back Family Guy because believe it or not it's TV-14 so it can air at 8pm. If that's an hour of Family Guy then Toonami really shouldn't bother claiming 8pm until the day comes when Adult Swim no longer has Family Guy. Despite King of the Hill and Cleveland Show leaving I don't foresee Family Guy leaving any time soon. I think it's renewed out to 2020 or 2022. All that said, they have WAY WAY WAAAAAAAY too many long running shounen going at the same time. There are 9 premieres and 7 of them will be long-running Shonen Jump anime. They gotta use some of that space for some more dang variety next year but as it stands the openings before 2AM will be few and far between next year. And there's definitely a part of me screaming "why did you get My Hero Academia, Black Clover and Boruto when you still had Shippuden, Dragon Ball Super, Hunter x Hunter and JoJo!?!?!" It's not like MHA and Black Clover have even done amazing and Shippuden is nowhere near over. When Pop Team Epic replaced DBZ Kai, I had a glimmer of hope for more variety and then Boruto is announced and I felt that hope be ripped from my hands. But despite that, they get an additional hour but of course, it's just filled with DBZ Kai and Samurai Jack. Maybe DBZ Kai is just a placeholder while they still have some rights to air the Buu saga but chances are they renegotiated the contract and spent money to bring back Kai. They probably could have lead with MHA or Shippuden just fine as long as they kept their expectations for the first hour in check. I don't think they should have more than 9 premieres a night, that's a huge amount. However, if only 2 of those are finite premieres then maybe they could stand to get a really cheap show for variety sake. Most of the variety here is in the reruns after 2AM and that's a waste. The whole line-up looks like a bloated mess but I gotta admit I'm impressed that franchise sequels aside there are no doubled up shows in this line-up. Compare that to pretty much any cable channel for 7 hours including Adult Swim on weekdays and Sunday and that's incredible. I hope this is a successful experiment by whatever metrics they judge it with. They didn't have to expand Toonami again, they could have kept an hour of original comedies in prime time but instead, they chose to expand Toonami another full hour after just gaining 10pm . It's incredible that Toonami has gone from cancellation as 9PM-11PM Saturday block on CN to a 12AM-6AM block on Adult Swim down to a 12AM-3: 30AM one and all the way back up to 6 hours and now it finally returns to 9PM where it ended. Only now instead of being just 2 hours, it's a whopping 7, just 3 hours less a week thanToonami's 2 hour afternoon block. What I time to be alive? Final thought, those line-up promos are gonna be long and they'll be naming off shows in breakneck speed. Good luck with that and all those bumpers Toonami crew.

I figure the logic to that is 11pm generally does much better than 9pm on Adult Swim. Before Toonami started later and just had a comedy lead-in but now it has to build it's own crescendo from 9pm-11pm before the inevitable decline as people go to bed. People are used to the idea that prime time is a great place to air shows but that's not true for cable because of network competition and sports. DBZ Kai and My Hero Academia are going to get hammered by College Football but without DBS in those crosshairs they can do well at 11pm and hopefully keep people until the premieres end at 2am. Another way of looking at it is this: how can you expect people to stay for even 2 hours of a 7 hour block if you put the one show they care about at the very start? If they put Super at 9pm it would do worse than if it was at 10:30 or 11pm and that would cause Toonami to immediately bleed viewers by 9:30. That could very easily make this whole 7 hour block a wash. Super isn't even likely to win the 9pm time slot with key demos but it's definitely gonna win at 11pm.

1) Attack on Titan - A solid first episode to the new season 2) JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable - An amusing first episode with plenty of character 3) Hunter x Hunter - The King and Poof show some growth and things are ramping up 4) My Hero Academia - Good setup for the Sports Festival, Bakugo calling out everyone else is pretty dang amusing 5) FLCL Progressive - It is still a decent finale but loses points for being a rerun 6) One-Punch Man - Saitama vs the fly is always hilarious no matter how many times I see it but this also loses points for being a rerun 7) Pop Team Epic - The mafia story was a highlight but the rest was just okay 8) Dragon Ball Super - This was pretty stupid honestly and doesn't do much for Krillin or Goku as characters but points for Roshi getting weed I didn't watch Black Clover, Naruto Shippuden, Lupin the 3rd or Cowboy Bebop

Given there's not much reason to DVR Family Guy to watch it later, it's very likely that the 3 day DVR ratings pulled My Hero Academia ahead of Family Guy and that's probably true of Attack on Titan as well. It's a bit disappointing to see only about a 13% increase in MHA's 18-49s with the 3 day DVR ratings but I wouldn't be surprised if every other premiere on Toonami had about a 15-20% increase when 3 days of DVR ratings are accounted for. Perhaps enough to round many of them up to above 0.20 with 18-49.

It’s probably no coincidence that Toonami has only gotten 2.5 hours longer with the addition of 3-4 long series and less frequent bumps updates. The network decides how big Toonami gets and the crew making the packaging just gotta make do with what they’re given.

It’s Labor Day weekend, a big traveling holiday. I for one have a destination wedding to attend. I had an out of town wedding to go to that weekend in 2016 as well. I assure you I don’t attend weddings often it’s just one of those weekends that people plan big events on.

Not at all. The pacing of season 2 is great. Really only that first episode drags.

This is a good use of a marathon night. I kinda wish they went ahead and ran 10pm-6am so they could squeeze in 14, 15 and 16 from season 2. That would get people entirely caught up for the next week. All 13 episodes of season 1 should more than suffice to pick up some new viewers though. Alternatively, it would have been good to do all 12 episodes of Attack on Titan season 2 if they could rerun them but MHA is gonna lead the block so it makes more sense to marathon the first season of it. Definitely glad it's not just a marathon of FLCL Progressive. That probably would have done about as bad or worse than the FLCL OVA marathon. They can save that for another time when it's not so fresh in people's minds. This marathon of MHA might actually do decently.

I'm kinda surprised they're bringing back One-Punch Man to rerun because it looked like they had just lost the streaming rights but with season 2 approaching it makes sense to rerun it. I welcome its return. Saitama makes for good late night rerun fodder. It seems kind of insane that they're expanding even more but they had the opportunity to slide things down to fit in Attack on Titan and chose to fill the opening with a rerun forcing expansion. Not sure if it's a good idea at this point but we'll see how it goes.

When they have 8-9 premieres before 2:30AM (which they seem to be doing soon) I don't think they really need another one that late.

Given it's considered episode 13.5, I dunno if they'd actually air that recap but it's dubbed. Airing 13.5 and 14 together would be a decent idea though.

I'd welcome Madoka finally airing but why do you suspect that of all things?

Well those numbers put things in perspective

That was KaggyFilms he's in quite a few FUNimation dubs.

I dunno, I thought Popuko blatantly choosing not to give back the pendant was kinda funny.

Ya gotta start somewhere.

Yes let's make Luffy into Captain Jack Sparrow, brilliant. But back on the topic of Pop Team Epic, I eagerly anticipate the general audience's reaction to it.

Theoretically, Jinyu is the part of the original Haruko with reservations while this Haruko aka Raharu is all the evil.

After I heard that Kim Manning likes Pop Team Epic a lot, I was pretty darn sure it was coming, and here we are. I enjoyed it, though the built-in rerun can get grating even with the minor differences to some scenes and different voice casts. That's definitely going to test the attention of the Toonami audience. It would feel appropriate on the comedy block. I kind of wish it was there but Toonami is intentionally trying something out of their action box with this one. I welcome the experiment but I don't have high hopes it's going to be a surprise hit. It will hopefully hold FLCL Progressive just fine. More importantly, DBZ Kai is leaving and we'll finally get to see if Buu Kai was more of a blessing or a curse for the rest of Toonami.

I think it’s fair to say that the idea of a sequel for FLCL wasn’t on a tremendous amount of fan’s minds before it was announced but there’s plenty of FLCL fans that are interested in seeing a sequel. Two years ago this probably would have broke a million after DBZ Kai. Things are considerably lower now all around. But it would not do as well as Jack. FLCL is much more niche than Jack and DBZ.

I would have to imagine the front end will shrink before the back end. It's just easier to keep anime reruns on at 3AM than return that time to comedy. At this point it would probably be a good idea to shift to 11pm, it's not like they're even making use of the earlier time to premiere FLCL Progressive before midnight. If they do that and drop DBZ, it's probably going to help at least a bit. 10:30 is an odd time to start anyway. That said there's still part of me that feels like cable decline remains the biggest factor here and the problem isn't the shows themselves. FLCL Progressive holds MHA pretty darn well so far. There's always been a sizable gap after DBZ Kai, the only thing that really changed is Kai used to hold Super well and even beat it but now it's holding it no better than most shows held Kai. While I can't say I honestly believe any other show would hold Super better short of maybe One-Punch Man season 2 (if that) I do think by eliminating Kai they would only have one large gap again and things would "settle" a half hour earlier and retention would improve because of that. It seems kind of ridiculous that DBZ Kai and One-Punch Man could do so well at midnight and other shows are nowhere near that level at midnight or even 11:30pm. The argument that it's all because of the Dragon Ball hour would make more sense if Toonami started at midnight or even 11:30pm but it starts at 10:30pm and the first non-DB show is at 11:30pm. That's not 1am, it's not that late on a Saturday. People used to stay up much later for their non-DB fix but that no longer seems to be the case. If the problem is the shows I think the main issue there is much of the line-up aren't shows you can simply jump into anymore. JoJo has been on off and on since late 2016, HxH has been on since mid 2016, DBZ has been on since late 2014 and Shippuden has been on since the start of 2014. On top of that, the latest Gundam series were a direct sequel to IBO season 1 which aired in 2016 and a series that is fully entrenched in the UC timeline. To watch Toonami now practically requires you to have at least been watching regularly since 2016. If you fell off any of those shows then you have to catch up through other means and once you do that, why even go back to Toonami unless you really love the group watch aspect and the community? They were wise to push Naruto and One Piece to the 2am hour when they did. It allowed newer or fresher shows their time to shine but when your newest attractions are buried behind glorified reruns people won't notice them even if they are promoted. DBS should be a tool used to draw viewers to other shows but it hasn't really been used for that purpose and it's looking like it won't be unless they separate it from DBZ Kai by July.

You could always look these things up if you're ever skeptical. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2018-06-02/toonami-delays-flcl-progressive-flcl-alternative-anime-english-subtitled-version-to-november/.132387

I must retract my prior statements about them not getting ads onto Crunchyroll. Glad to hear they play at least once per episode. Was it the general promo or an episode promo? I'm watching an older GGO episode to see for myself since I got behind on it recently.

They did? That's fantastic!