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leafy sea dragon wrote:

I'm seeing "reruns are the problem" stated over and over again. What makes anime reruns so different from the American programming reruns that dominate the airwaves on the rest of the country's programming schedules? Except for HBO, those shows are available for streaming too. Heck, I watch a lot of reruns of Criminal Minds playing catch-up on the series.

What makes it different is that a lot of those reruns are for shows that are episodic in nature. Most anime relies on getting the viewer to tune in each week in order to see what happens next. Once a show ends, that main premise is gone. Additionally, you use Criminal Minds as an example, but you also say that you rely on reruns to play catch up on things you've missed. The problem here is that Toonami reruns are being played to a much smaller crowd which is made up of a crowd that mostly has seen all those shows already.

Also, reruns on American shows tend to happen when a show is made by the network it is on so they have every incentive to air it over and over. That isn't a a quality that anime shares. Anime also doesn't have the magical combination that companies look for with syndicated shows: lots of episodes and popularity backed up by the original network's ratings.

tuxedocat wrote:

Whether shows get a new dub is quite beside the point. The point is the bad habit Toonami has relapsed back into - rerunning the same small group of shows ad nauseum.

My point was among the lines of while constant reruns are bad they can actually help with pulling in new viewers but such a thing doesn't work as well when you have a set of animes that are well over 200-300 episodes long and aired exclusively on a block that only comes on saturday nights/sunday mornings.

{Fixed your quote tags. ~nbahn}

Greed1914 wrote:

=What makes it different is that a lot of those reruns are for shows that are episodic in nature. Most anime relies on getting the viewer to tune in each week in order to see what happens next. Once a show ends, that main premise is gone. Additionally, you use Criminal Minds as an example, but you also say that you rely on reruns to play catch up on things you've missed. The problem here is that Toonami reruns are being played to a much smaller crowd which is made up of a crowd that mostly has seen all those shows already.

Also, reruns on American shows tend to happen when a show is made by the network it is on so they have every incentive to air it over and over. That isn't a a quality that anime shares. Anime also doesn't have the magical combination that companies look for with syndicated shows: lots of episodes and popularity backed up by the original network's ratings.

Hmm, those are good points. American television is meant to be suitable for reruns, whereas Japanese television does not normally have reruns and thus can't really work in quite the same way.

Do you mean that the anime audience tends not to watch something more than once? Or that some do, but the audience isn't big enough to sustain itself on reruns the way nationally-broadcast, very popular shows like Criminal Minds does?

Now that I think about it, what IS the point of TOONAMI? Why do people even care it exists? Really curious about it.

Hameyadea wrote:

The main problem, as I see it, is the high reruns count and the late hours. Who is going to stay up until 3 A.M. to watch a show, rerun or not?

DVR The same way late-night anime in Japan air up until 3am or even later.
(Or watch the videos on the Adult Swim website.)

Jayhosh wrote:

Stuart Smith wrote:

I wonder what it means that Space Dandy was one of the shows cut; keeping in mind Space Dandy was Toonami's baby and their attempt on "simualdubbed" anime. Am I to take this as it wasn't big like they had hoped and now they're trying to distance themselves from it?

I don't think so. They also cut Attack on Titan, arguably the block's biggest draw in terms of viewers. And similar to the case of Bebop, Space Dandy seems like the type of show that will eventually be back to fill an empty slot.

Yeah, Space Dandy has done very well for them.
It's because it's in reruns, and the cut in timeslots is now forcing them to cut back on reruns.
Isn't that what people have been asking for?
If people want a cut back on reruns, then why expect for more Space Dandy reruns even when it's done well for them - that's like circular logic.

Lelouch Vi wrote:

I honestly believe that if Toonami's budget wasn't so limited, then they wouldn't be in this boat

Toonami would have more budget if Toonami could get as good ratings as the rest of Adult Swim.

Wyvern wrote:

What really bothers me is that they cut the 11:30 slot. That was consistently Toonami's highest-rated timeslot, even before Attack on Titan came along.

I can see logic in cutting the late hours which were performing poorly, but it makes NO sense to remove the strongest half-hour on the block,

The reason to cut a timeslot is if the network believes that the current show won't get as high a rating as what would replace it in that timeslot.

Remember, a timeslot is always a competition for ratings, between the competition with other networks in the same timeslot, as well as between an incumbent and a possible replacement.

DmonHiro wrote:

Now that I think about it, what IS the point of TOONAMI? Why do people even care it exists? Really curious about it.

It's really the last vestige of anime on N. American TV landscape from the glory years. During the glory years, Toonami was at the center of it all, albeit on the daily afternoon timeslots. TV is still a gateway for many casuals. (BTW DmonHiro, how is/was anime shown in Romania?)

Although a better question might be: would losing the post-3:30am timeslots really matter to Toonami and its viewers?
People already say they don't watch reruns, and that's where the reruns are.

leafy sea dragon wrote:

The people who get their anime mainly from Toonami are the people who don't want to spend their time reading stuff from the bottom of the screen constantly. The main merit to subtitles, I feel, is that they can come out faster than a dub (unless the show was made with foreign broadcasts in mind, like Space Dandy).

I wasn't addressing the issue of whether there is an audience that prefers to watch dubs. Of course there is. I'm suggesting that that audience is shrinking over time because of the widespread availability of new series via streaming.

To me, the "main merit" of subtitles is being able to enjoy a show with its original actors in the original language, regardless of whether it's an anime or a Godard film.

DmonHiro wrote:

Now that I think about it, what IS the point of TOONAMI? Why do people even care it exists? Really curious about it.

To snag people who happen across it, the kind who didn't know they were looking for anime? At least that's how it was in 2000, and even earlier for the Sci-Fi channel. It helped that the old Toonami block was at a time that made sense for that to work.

Anime in Romania has a weird history.
Right after the fall of communism we finally got actual TV programming.
Among the things we got were full length cartoon shows. They were a mix of western and Japanese cartoons, but back then we didn't know it at first. Among the first anime we got were Voltron and Macron, the modified versions of two anime shows. They aired on the national TV channels: Macron during weekdays and Voltron on weekends. Voltron used to be watched by the whole family in many houses. (the parents would watch Voltron with the children at noon, and in turn the children would watch Dallas with the parents an 7PM).

Later we got Sailor Moon (7PM) and Dragonball (4PM), but this time, they weren't modified versions. We actually got the uncensored Japanese versions of both those shows. however, there was a catch: we got them double-dubbed. The Japanese audio would play at the same time as the Romanian voiceover. It was a single person doing all the voices. Still, we got all the episodes, including the ones were the Sailor Senshi DIE in season 1. We didn't have a dedicated anime block, but most of the Saturday morning cartoons were anime, just dubbed in various languages (usually German).

Fast forward a few years and we finally got cable TV. It was new, it was hip, and everyone wanted it. Among the new dozen channels were three Italian ones that really stood out for the children, because they had a ton of anime (we still didn't know they came from Japan).
Italia 1 showed Cat's Eye, Sailor Moon and a few others in the mornings. Canale 5 had Sailor Moon R and Kaitetsu Zorro at 5 PM and Ret4 had Sailor Moon S and a few others at 9PM. Basically, we watched 3 seasons of Sailor Moon at the same time. It was very confusing before we learned they were separate seasons. Again, most families would watch Sailor Moon S together. Few more years and we got German channels that were similar.

It wasn't until we got Animax (first called Anime+) that we had our own anime channel. It wasn't 24 hours, only 8, but we were happy. It showed a lot of anime while it was Anime+, but it went to shit once it got renamed Animax. In contrary to their name, Animax axed half of the anime time and put in reality shows owned by Sony. Ratings dropped like a meteor and I have no idea if the channel is still operational.

tl:dr: Romania had anime on TV as well, but really doesn't anymore.

Romanian anime fans do not watch neither Romanian nor English dubs. Television in Romania has always been subtitled, so we're all really fast readers. There was an odd attempt to dub anime in Romanian during the beginning of Anime+, but people actually wrote letters to the station to, and I quote form my cousin's letter, "Stop airing those pathetic dubs, they're turning serious moments into comedy".

I hope you enjoyed this short lecture on the fate of Romanian anime channels. I pray I didn't bore you.

Lelouch Vi wrote:

I honestly believe that if Toonami's budget wasn't so limited, then they wouldn't be in this boat

Toonami would have more budget if Toonami could get as good ratings as the rest of Adult Swim.

I honestly don't see or understand why it isn't getting as good as ratings as the rest of AS when most of AS is simply filled with fox show reruns or stupid shows like Tim and Eric. I think the real problem or at least a part of the problem is the fact that, Anime in general to non anime fans, carries the stigmata of being for children, because there should be no way in hell, that Toonami is losing ratings compared to reruns of the Fox shows for the umpteenth time.

DmonHiro, actually, that was very interesting. So when you watched anime on Italian cable channels, were they dubbed in Italian with Romanian subs, or were they dubbed in Japanese?

American TV is very insular--almost everything that airs here is produced here. We barely even get Canadian originals, and while there's a long history of British programs on American TV, they're mostly aired on public broadcasting stations rather than for profit stations and are seen as "educational" and don't get very good ratings (even the silly sitcoms!).

If something is in a foreign language, forget it. With all the cable/satellite/carbon fiber tv networks available to consumers today, there are very few that air anything other than English besides the Spanish channels designed for Spanish speakers (thus, no English subs).
Now with internet streaming, Americans are finally beginning to realize that other countries make TV shows and there are growing numbers of people watching shows in their original languages--but not enough for anything but the most obscure channel to actually air a foreign language show. So anime on a mainstream American TV cable network, even dubbed, is a big deal. As a TV watcher, I'd like to see American TV become less insular and more varied internationally even in its dying days.

Oh, the cable channels were not translated at all. They still aren't. Only the national television channels had subtitles. No, we watched anime in the language of the channel it was in: Italian or German. That's why many people my age can understand those languages, but can't really speak them.

This is unfortunate, but at least it's in the later hours (other than the 11:30 slot). It would be worse if it became a 3am-6am block!

There was one girl I talked to from Romania that told me that Dragon Ball was sometimes shown in English, and that's how a lot of kids understood the language. Not sure how true that is.

Slight schedule update: while Attack on Titan had been scheduled to return this upcoming Saturday, this is no longer the case. The shows that would have aired from 3 to 5 (which'll all be pulled the following week by the way) are moving up half an hour and IGPX will be airing an extra week at 4:30 to compensate.

I guess they figured there's no point in bringing Titan back after taking a break for a week just to remove it again the following Saturday.

^
Well, that's one more already-aired popular show gone from the time chart.

Maybe this will raise the possibility of at least one more new show (besides Kill la Kill) appearing on Toonami in the future?

Ah, Dragon Ball Z WAS shown in English, but on Cartoon Network, far later then when Dragon Ball was on.

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