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Why was Toonami moved to Saturday nights in 2004?




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Mr.manguy



Joined: 16 Sep 2011
Posts: 16
PostPosted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 5:48 pm Reply with quote
In 2004, Cartoon Network moved its flagship Toonami lineup to saturday nights. This change came as a supprise to many fans, but why exactly did this happen though? Well, through reading various old toonami related topics on Toonzone from 2003-2004. I have 3 possiblilities as to why this happened.

1. Starting around 2003, Cartoon Network was apparently trying to target Toonami at a much younger audience than the average Toonami viewer which Sean Akins more or less said in an interview, was roughly 12-14 years old. Thus came things like SD Gundam, He Man, and Transformers Armada to appeal to that 6-11 year old demographic. The 9-16 year old audience, Toonami's actual target audience at the time, and older viewers were annoyed at the new programing, and although they still tuned in, CN wanted squarely 6-11.

2. Toonami's lineup in mid-late 2003 basicaly sucked. Half of it was Dragon Ball and DBZ, and the other half was the aforementioned younger skewing shows. Shows that would've otherwise aired on Toonami either went to Adult Swim, or the SVES block. In a way, the move to Saturday sort of sparked new life in to Toonami with some fresh programing.

3. Some shows like Yu Yu Hakusho, and Rurouni Kenshin became too violent to air on weekdays without completely butchering them, which is one of the reasons Kenshin was moved to SVES. So moving to saturdays provided looser standards than what was considered appropriate for daytime TV in the US.

Keep in mind, all of this is based of what I've read from the Toonzone forms, Adult Swim boards, and official press releases and statements from CN and Willams Street, so feel free to provide any additional reasons and info if you have any.
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Hypeathon



Joined: 12 Aug 2010
Posts: 1176
PostPosted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 7:17 pm Reply with quote
Ya know at this point, as much as I want to throw in an educated guess as to what I think is the reason and determine whether what some fans have speculated makes sense or not, I'd feeyl far more comfortable just asking the Toonami crew during whenever their next Tumblr Q&A is.

I mean, most of the people involved with Toonami now are the same guys involved with Toonami from the beginning if not at least during the TOM 1 era. So they probably don't mind sharing that information regarding the shift from weekday afternoons to Saturday nights. And they can be pretty open about stuff depending on the question. For instance, I asked a question a while back about where the Better Cartoon Shows promos came from and apparently a guy named Michael Cahill who was the original editor for Toonami first came up with that.
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