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INTEREST: Adult Swim Gauges Interest in Bringing Back Toonami

Especially as television standards have changed some series could get by unedited. I mean, does anyone actually pay attention to what happens and is said in Adventure Time. Standards have lowered themselves and that is the reason of 4Kids' issues when it comes to edits because that's what they are seen as by the hardcores. But they are not able to hold their children base anymore and that is why they are fading away. CN has the chance to embrace a more mature kid and young teen audience.

Though given there's Pokemon and Beyblade and Bakugan on CN, kids will know of it and get into it just fine in that regard. There'll still be badly dubbed and edited children's anime as long as there's toys to sell, and they can get into that way.. but what made Toonami special was it was people's only real exposure to anime in the old days, and that's not really needed anymore as Mr. SickVisionz shows us.

like that one time : Remember That time when Goku borrowed all of your energy to form the Spirit Bomb to defeat Buu? he need your help again! #BringBackToonami

It says a lot that anime on tv was virtually non-existant before toonami and in its wake it has become scarce once more.

Sure there will always be anime with associated toy/card game tie ins that little kids will eat up like cake, but honestly that to me isn't much of a gateway. There are tons of kids who grew up on stuff like robotech without even knowing it was anime never giving anime a second look until toonami came along and gave them some meatier anime to fill their unsuspecting appetite.

That was their gateway. I sincerely doubt kids to any great number will grow up watching pokemon on saturday mornings and end up even so much as a casual fan in the future. Give them something to grow up with like toonami and suddenly the likelihood of that happening goes up incredibly.

wut?

Toonami and the airing of anime on Cartoon Network did more to create new anime fans in the US than any single other thing in the last 15 years. Heck, maybe ever. They shouldn't have canceled it in the first place.

BUT.

The current attitude of Cartoon Network towards anime is one of general hostility. One look at their Adult Swim promos over the last several years is all it takes to realize this. The few anime they still broadcast has been very late on Saturday night, and even those are the few titles Cartoon Network paid money for the broadcast rights (as opposed to being paid by the publisher to broadcast it).

Let's say they get over themselves in that regard. They're still not going to have the merchandising and home video rights to the anime they show, the way they do with all of the original programming they make. That was more or less the catalyst for why they stopped bothering with anime in the first place. But let's say they're not bothered by THAT either. Well, there's still one more giant hurdle they'd have to accept, and that's this:

Dedicated anime fans don't watch anime on US television anymore, haven't for years, and aren't likely to go back to doing so.

Oh sure, we haven't had much choice in the matter. But now that we're doing it, now that simulcasting is the expected norm, there's no going back.

The huge online enthusiasm for anime has always been there. It's not like this is a sudden revelation to anyone. What struck them was how many people were willing to translate their online support into actually watching TV, and if you ask me that's not something that will last very long among the established anime fans.

I'm not saying Cartoon Network should not bring back Toonami. They totally should. But they need to understand two things. First things first, there absolutely must be online streams of the block for the shows and the interstitial materials. Second, no obscure time slot stuff where only the faithful will tune in. Toonami introduced new fans to anime because it was running on weekdays after school was out. The existence and prevalence of DVRs is irrelevant, as setting it up to record a show is something you do once you're ALREADY invested.

Then and only then, once all that stuff is in place, does the vital issue of what shows do they actually run come into play...

@JOE: It's Adult Swim asking people want a revivial or not, so odds are it would take the place of the Current Saturday Night Adult Swim broadcast, er that is to say it would be TOM on Adult Swim instead of regular CN, so more like the old Midnight Run.

With plenty of means to watch anime online nowadays, much of the original charm from watching anime on TV (i.e.: Toonami) has been lost since many folks would much rather watch a title when they can online instead of waiting on whichever time slot that Cartoon Network puts it on,

Among anime fans though? Who is going to watch a few year old show on a weekly basis when they can easily find it online instead?

2.) Nostalgia blocks seem to do pretty well if marketed right. Nick's The 90's are All That, seems to be holding up.

3.)They could probably use a mix of new and old, and it wouldn't have to be exclusively anime, I remember Toonami airing Powerpuff Girls, Justice League, and some other American shows.

4.) Mona Marshall is horrible as Ryoko. She sounds like every annoying pre-pubescent male character in anime ever now.

bglassbrook wrote:

kakoishii wrote: You gotta appreciate that they revived TOM as we all last loved him (the pre-bastardized thomas the tank engine one) Yeah, brining him back as v2.0 was easily the highlight of it for me.

Not to nitpick, but they actually used the 3rd version TOM.

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i232/sparkprime/TOMevolution.jpg

kakoishii wrote:

It says a lot that anime on tv was virtually non-existant before toonami and in its wake it has become scarce once more.

The first has to do with the anime boom. Along with shows like Pokemon, it was the first real exposure to anime America has had. That's never going to be recreated because America is already exposed to anime. It's like chickenpox, or the gold rush, it's only going to happen once. America will never have that first contact ever again.

The second is because of marketing and network share reasons.

Robotech came on in a time before the internet. People are no longer sheltered from foreign influences anymore. No one growing up in this age is not going to know the shows they're watching aren't anime or it comes from Japan. Not when even the simpliest Google search is going to enlighten them.

And that's the main flaw with your argument, you're looking at this as if this is still the pre-internet and pre-anime boom days, when it's not. Those two things alone make the world of difference

Tell that to the YouTube videos (full episodes, AMVs, toy reviews) of stuff like Beyblade which get millions of views. They're perfect gateways for kids into the medium.

No one's saying Toonami shouldn't come back, just that all the people expecting lightning to strike twice are in for a rude awakening.

OK, for one thing a lot of people seem to assume that Toonami would just be installed into [as]'s current Action block, when there's no real confirmation of when it would even air.

[as] aired it as their April Fools thing, in possibly the only place they could easily take the time. Adult Swim and Toonami were both produced by Williams Street.

How is there current anime block not Toonami without the Toonami branding? It's a bunch of action-oriented anime playing for 2-3 hours. It's not like you can garner much attention playing older shows ad nauseum.

Williams Street just acknowledged fan feedback on the Toonami issue:



At the time of this post the original "Want it back? Let us know." message was retweeted 14,428 times, according to twitter.