BlitzTheComicGuy
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Conventional Wisdom: My Toonami Memories
🕑 Added 2021-04-22 06:58:43 +0000 UTCWaaaay back when I first started doing Patreon blogs, I penned a fairly long account of how I got into anime in the first place. One of the running themes of that blog was how I actually missed out on a lot of the formative hallmarks of most North American anime fans of my generation. Probably the biggest repeat offender was Toonami. A whole wave of 90s Kid otaku tell tales of how Toonami was their daily anime education, but I grew up with the one cable provider in all of North Georgia that DIDN’T pick up Cartoon Network back in ’92. I’ll tell it again because I still think it’s a good bit: I grew up so close to Atlanta that we literally DROVE PAST THE WILLIAMS STREET BUILDING on the way to church. I could look out the car window twice a week and see these Cartoon Network murals right frickin’ there, but the only times I ever actually got to WATCH it was when we drove an hour down to my grandparents’ house in LaGrange. It was annoying.
And yet, I DID technically get to see it. Not as much as Young Me would have liked, but as with so many other things at that point, it was enough to make an impression. Again, my early experiences with anime consisted mostly of gazing longingly from a distance, appreciating the LOOK of Japanese animation even if I didn’t get a chance to sit down and watch it very often. So it was just business as usual when Cartoon Network started airing Toonami and I barely ever got a chance to watch it. And yet, yeah, I did watch it. The more I sit back and think about it, I guess I really didn’t TOTALLY miss out on my compatriot’s first big anime experience. I mean, one way or another, I did see a lot more anime on Cartoon Network than I ever did on The Sci-Fi Chanel. I can probably get a whole blog out of this. And hey, speaking of The Sci-Fi Chanel, I had a lot of fun going down memory lane for THAT blog, so why not try it again? So let’s get to it, here are my memories of Toonami.
First of all, despite all of my complaining about not getting to watch Cartoon network very often, I still have one thing I get to legitimately brag about: I got to see OG Toonami. I don’t just mean the times before T.O.M. as voiced by Steve Blum, I’m talking about before the whole “robot on a spaceship hosting everything” setup even existed. Back in the first year of Toonami’s existence, the host of the whole programing block was Moltar. Yep, that one Space Ghost bad guy in the big heat suit, the first year or so of Toonami had CGI bits of THAT guy pulling levers and running the show, literally shooting new episodes of the shows at Earth every weekday. Actually, I must have seen more than I realized. Looking back at these shorts, it’s surprising how many of these things I recognize, despite somehow also TOTALLY forgetting what the original Toonami logo looked like before just now. Man, that’s some generic blobby graffiti font. Heck the 90s-ness of just about everything is amazing to look back on now. Just check out that YouTube montage I linked to and marvel at how much skateboarding and snowboarding is on display. EXTREME, right fellow kids?
Also, it’s weird how these Moltar bumpers can feel so familiar to me, yet the actual early Toonami LINE-UP looks so different from what I remember. For as much as Toonami is remembered as A Generation’s First Introduction To Anime, the earliest schedules of the block were actually very light on the ol’ Japanimation. When it first hit the air in Spring 1997, the only anime present was Voltron. The rest of the lineup was devoted to Thundercats and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and a rotating assortment of old Hanna-Barbara action shows like The Herculoids and non-comedic Birdman (plus the occasional Fleischer Superman shorts). One needs to remember that, as much as we may remember Toonami as “that anime showcase” NOW, it was actually created to be just “the action cartoon block,” the latest in a series of such programming blocks on Cartoon Network. Obviously, if you’re looking to fill out a few hours of broadcast time with action cartoons, anime provides you with a lot more choices than the backlog of American TV, so it gradually took over more and more screen time, but it WAS gradual. You’d still see ReBoot or Transformers: Beast Wars or freakin’ Superfriends just as often as Robotech or Ronin Warriors. But the anime was there, and even if I only caught a glimpse of it every so often, it still sank in. I know I’d seen Voltron SOMEWHERE before this, probably in some syndicated filler purgatory, but I do know Toonami was the first time I sever saw any Robotech/Macross. And it’d soon become the first place I saw a lot of things.
Throughout the latter half of ’98, Toonami really amped up the anime quotient by adding Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. I was at least tangentially aware of both these shows beforehand, thanks to both of them being syndicated on local channels in the early morning graveyard slots. In fact, it was the impressive (for 5am) viewership that those shows got on our specific Atlanta airings (I think on Atlanta’s UPN affiliate, chanel 69?) that got the shows picked up by Cartoon Network in the first place. I wasn’t one of those viewers, though. Even if I was curious about anime, it wasn’t “wake up before dawn to watch a show I didn’t know anything about” curious. I do have VERY fuzzy memories of seeing both shows on TV in rare instances where we had to get up super early for something, like a dentist appointment or whatever. But even then, I never had a chance to sit down and watch it, it was just colorful background noise while we got ready to go. It wasn’t until Toonami that I got my serious introduction to either.
So, yeah, let’s talk about that. I have no clear memory of the first time I saw either of these shows on Cartoon Network, and I have a feeling that it was because neither one would have FELT like a first time. One of the biggest frustrations I had in only getting to watch Toonami in random chunks every few weeks at the MOST was keeping up with storylines. The more Toonami started leaning on anime, the more I had to cope with actual continuity and plot arcs and other stuff seemly designed to infuriate kids who couldn’t watch every single day. Sailor Moon wasn’t quite as bad, as it did have some relatively self-contained plots of the week, though I DO recall being a real pill this one time over it. We were staying at my Grandparents for several days straight, long enough for me to actually catch an entire arc of Sailor Moon for once. It was a filler arc (the Makai Tree, if you’re curious) but just being able to follow ANY storyline from beginning to end for once was a special treat… which made me all kinds of surly when I found out we were supposed to have some kind of stupidy stunky actual family interaction when the climactic episode was supposed to air. Why, it was almost as if my parents thought we were visiting my grandparents to actually VISIT MY GRANDPARENTS or something! So we went to some park or something and I was an insufferable pouty grump the whole time, only to realize when we got back that I’d gotten the schedule confused and I got to see the final episode anyway. Man, Past Me was really unbearable.
But let’s be honest here, Sailor Moon was still an officially designated “Girl’s Show ™” and pre-teen me was only ever going to pay so much attention to it. Now Dragon Ball Z? THAT’S where it was at, man. Wild action, wonky science fiction, kung fu space aliens, exploding planets, DBZ had everything Young Me wanted to see more of… and I was in a CONSTANT state of wanting more because there was never ever a point where I felt like I had any idea what was going on. You present day spoiled youngsters with your box sets and online streaming and ability to binge an entire series on command will NEVER be able to understand how frustrating a show like DBZ was to people who couldn’t get in at the very first episode and catch EVERY, SINGLE, EPISODE afterwards in the proper order. Most DBZ fans look back on the early days of its arrival in The States and complain about all the editing, but MY big complaint was just that was forever being dropped in the middle of some insane nonsense with NO idea what was happening. Watching Dragon Ball Z in isolated chunks with weeks and weeks in between is a lot like a recurring fever dream. Things just… happen, and you kind of just have to go along with it. Throughout this entire era of Toonami, I don’t feel like I ever once saw an episode of DBZ that actually started or resolved anything. It just seemed to be a constant parade of characters scrambling round in the lull between the important bits. Yeah, I know, you could argue that’s what EVERY thinks about DBZ at some point, but it’s a lot different when you didn’t even SEE the important bits to give the scrambling around some sense of context. I knew whatever was happening LOOKED a lot cooler than anything I might have seen on The Disney Afternoon or what have you, but God help me if anybody asked me what any of it MEANT.
I know I’ve told this story before, but one of by favorite Toonami memories is of the one time I actually DID get to see an entire arc play out from beginning to end. One year we were down at my grandparents’ for New Year’s, and I discovered that Toonami was doing an overnight DBZ marathon called “New Year’s Evil.” So I wound up staying up all through the night, back when that was a REALLY big deal, getting to finally experience what DBZ was like when you actually had some context for how events in one episode led into the next. It was great at the time, but in retrospect it’s a little bit pathetic. See, the arc they marathoned in its entirety was the Garlic Jr arc. Yes, shake your heads in shame, DBZ fans, for there was once a time when the ONLY chapter of the entire Dragon Ball saga that I was properly familiar with was a filler arc sequel to a non-canonical movie that not even Team Four Star could be bothered with back in the day. But Past Me didn’t care that I hadn't seen Dead Zone before hand or that Goku basically isn’t around or how nothing ends up mattering in the long run, I was just happy to finally get SOME semblance of resolution for once. After so many experiences of watching episodes end on unsatisfying cliffhangers, knowing we’d be going back home afterwards, and fully realizing that they show would be somewhere COMPLETELY unrelated by the time I finally got to watch again, this felt like a major achievement.
But of course, by the time THAT happened, Toonami had already undergone a massive shake-up. In the summer of 1999, which is a LOT later than it feels when we all look back, Moltar and his big canon on the Ghost Planet building were officially replaced by new robot host TOM onboard the spaceship Absolution. It wasn’t a huge stretch, since Moltar was technically in space already, and I have to confess that I personally missed the change over completely. One afternoon I was at my grandparents’ house and Moltar was the host, then the next time we visited this new robot guy was in charge. And boy was he ever in charge. While the details would be tweaked quite a bit over the years, THIS is the branding everyone remembers about Toonami. When Cartoon Network revived the block for the big nostalgia pop, they didn’t bring back Moltar, the brought back TOM, and for good reason.
Obviously, a scifi dork like me is going to be partial to robots and spaceships, but even when I take that severe advantage out of the equation, TOM-era really has a lot going for it. Moltar did a few video game reviews and speeches over his time as host, but it was with TOM that the Toonami bumpers truly took on the feel of being a real show unto themselves. TOM and the ships AI SARA and their mission to broadcast Toonami as a sort of pirate TV station was a cool hook all on its own, and as I said back in the Sci-Fi Chanel blog, I’m a total sucker for when the branding is extensive enough to feel like its own self-contained world. Heck, they actually did a few Toonami specials JUST about the adventures of TOM and co. which never world have worked if audiences hadn’t bought into the characters on their own And yet… look, I’m not gonna commit nerd heresy and claim I don’t LIKE TOM. He’s great, especially in his early squat, big-headed form. But at the same time, as I’ve looked back over the original Moltar stuff to job my memory, it really resonated with me in ways a lot of the vintage TOM shorts don’t. It’s kind of a nitpicky thing to say, but it all comes down to the colors for me. Tom and The Absolution are dominated by a blue color scheme, while Moltar’s segments are more of a redish hue to them, and I just like red better. Yeah, I know blue is the more stereotypical “clean glowy futuristic” color, and no other color world have worked as well with the designs they came up with, but I still find that I like looking at the warmer, redder art on the Moltar segments. It’s totally a personal preference, and there’s every possibility that I wouldn’t feel this way if I’d only been introduced to Toonami after TOM took over. For the record, I’m also one of the weird few who greatly preferred TNT’s MonsterVision as a host-less programing block over when Joe Bob Briggs took over, so I’m clearly susceptible to First Installment Wins. (Also, how weird is it to watch those earliest TOM clips and NOT hear Steve Blum doing the voice? He didn't take on the role until TOM 2.0)
Then again, it could ALSO be that the TOM era is where my Toonami experiences somehow managed to get even MORE complicated than they already were. I still got to see snatches of Toonami here and there, and I specifically remember being impressed by the occasional episodes of Tenchi I managed to catch, but Real Life was getting really complicated at this point. We were in the process of moving away from Atlanta up to the endless tobacco fields of North Carolina at this point, and while this process did include several weeks of crashing at my grandparents’ and getting the single longest sustained dose of Toonami I’d ever had, it was then followed by the longest drought ever. For you see, our new home was SO far out in the middle of nowhere that they didn’t even HAVE cable out there. I mean, I’m pretty sure we couldn’t have afforded it at the time anyway, but it wasn’t just us. At least back when I lived there, the only TV options in that town were regular broadcast TV or getting a satellite dish… and we sure as heck weren’t getting a satellite dish. So I went from not having access to Cartoon Network to not having access to ANY cable channels, and since this was still the dawn of the aughts, it’s not like watching stuff online was an option. We still had frickin’ DIAL UP for pete’s sake. And it should go without saying that we weren’t driving down to my grandparents’ QUITE as often now that they were two states away.
The one lifeline I DID have was the fact that my one cousin in the state had also turned out to be an anime dweeb like me, so whenever we went and visited my aunt & uncle I usually wound up watching Toonami with him. However, for whatever reason, I don’t remember going for visits over there anywhere near as often. I think it was an even longer drive than going to my grandparents had been, and we probably couldn’t afford the gas as often. Whatever the case was, while it really wasn’t very often, I DID catch my first tastes of Outlaw Star and The Big O at their house, not to mention The 08th MS Team. I’m sure I saw Gundam Wing once or twice when it aired, and I THINK I even caught an episode or two of the original Moble Suit Gundam, but 08th MS Team was the only Gundam that ever really resonated with me. Of course, I also caught a LOT more of Dragon Ball, both in the “Z” and original varieties. We were WELL into the days of Toonami being at least 50% DBZ at all times by this point. And I can definitely say that then, as now, I prefer Z over the original, at least the more blatantly comedic versions. Even without all the obvious editing, I just took to the straight up scifi action over the raunchy fantasy comedy (though the original’s closing theme is still an all-time favorite).
But here’s the REALLY weird thing, one that an awful lot of people seem to forget even happened. While I didn’t have regular access to Cartoon Network for most of my teenage years, there WAS a time where I did have regular access to Toonami. Technically. After Pokémon blew the doors wide open and everybody was looking to cash in on this newfangled anime thing, Kid’s WB really went all in. Yeah, they picked up Cartcaptors and Yu-Gi-Oh, but that wasn’t the thing that got me the most excited. No, what thrilled me was the announcement that Kids WB would be picking up Toonami itself! It was kind of a brilliant set up, the bumpers showing TOM flying The Absolution through some kind of space portal and “invading” the WB airspace from 3-to-5 to bring Toonami to the masses before heading back and re-emerging on Cartoon Network for THEIR block from 5-to-7. Since my moody teenage self felt like an exile out in the middle of nowhere, this whole concept really worked for me, like TOM himself was swooping in to my rescue! …and then I actually SAW the Kids WB version of Toonami.
First of all, let’s talk about the bumpers. As I said earlier, Toonami didn’t just get its claws into the brains of viewers thanks to the shows themselves. That helped, obviously, but the fully immersive branding of TOM and his robo-crew are what really elevated things to the next level. It’s the reason why, to this day, otaku of a specific generation claim to be fans of Toonami itself, not just whatever shows it was airing. But while Kid’s WB Toonami certainly shows clips of TOM and The Absolution, it did NOT replicate the all-encompassing atmosphere at all. I’ve never been much of a fan of the techno music Toonami always insisted on using as its trademark sound, but it DEFINITELY set the mood a lot better than the obnoxious new jingle Kids WB used. Also, really watch that clip I linked to, look at how rushed everything is. It seriously looks like they rendered out an intro sequence, decided it was taking to long, and just played it on fast forward to save time. Everything just looks too bright and hyperactive, which is fine in the ORIGINAL Kids WB bumpers set on the studio lot, but Toonami already had its own established vibe that these clips totally clash with. Heck, they don’t even have Steve Blum voicing TOM! Tom never even says anything as far as I can remember, I think it’s all just generic Kids WB narration. Again, nothing against Jim Cummings or whoever, but everyone who’d be attracted by seeing the Toonami name already knows what they expect Toonami to sound like, and that’s not it. And it goes without saying that the immersive world building Cartoon Network did with the Toonami setting is totally absent here. No game reviews, no editorials from TOM, no original specials or anything like that. Oh, but we do get “Toonami Trax!” That’s a fair trade, right?
But the thing everybody REALLY complained about was the shows. For the first week or two, they TRIED to sucker us in with episodes of the one show everybody most associated with Toonami by this point, Dragon Ball Z, but right away it was clear something was off. They didn’t start at the beginning or show things in anywhere near a proper order, but instead just grabbed random episodes from all across the first few arcs and threw them at the audience without any regard to how much had been skipped over in between. Yes, this was what my viewing experience with DBZ had been all along, but it’s different when it’s the TV station ITSELF doing it instead of Real Life.
And that’s when they actually SHOWED DBZ, or anime in general. That wasn’t very often. I know I went out of my way to point out that Toonami didn’t start out at “The Anime Block,” but by 2001 that’s what everybody knew it as. So everybody saw it as a bit of a problem when the only anime consistently on the block was Pokémon. Dragon Ball Z never came back after that initial fake-out introduction, and while they did throw in some occasional ringers by adding Sailor Moon and Cardcaptors at various intervals, they didn’t last long either. Instead, the bulk of Kids WB Toonami was just drawn from the same batch of shows they could have shown with regular Kids WB branding. SOME of it worked under the old “Action Cartoon” concept of the block, like when they’d show Batman Beyond or X-Men: Evolution. And I guess if you stretched “action” to a very VERY younger audience, you could possibly make a case for Jackie Chan Adventures or Rescue Heroes. But even by that extremely generous definition, I can’t fathom the inclusion of shows like Scooby-Doo or Detention. Heck, frickin Generation O! was at one point technically a Toonami show thanks to Kids WB. That is just SHAMEFUL.
So, yeah, I didn’t like Kids WB Toonami at all. I wouldn’t have liked it under any circumstances, but the fact that I had no access to “real” Toonami at this point just made the watered down “fake” version that much more of an insult. And I was really starting to get serious about liking anime at this point, too. The wake of Pokémon had unleashed Dgimon and Monster Rancher and Escaflowne and… um… Flint the Time Detective and… um… Mon Colle Knights… Okay, most the anime I had regular access to just gave me all the more reason to pine for actual Cartoon Network Toonami, but it was still more that I’d ever seen before. I was getting my hands on copies of Animerica and going with my cousin to anime club festivals and even owning a smattering of real life anime on VHS myself. The point is, the more I anime I got elsewhere, the more pathetic Kids WB Toonami seemed. To be honest, I don't even remember when they canceled it. I mean, I know they did sometime in 2002 but I have no memory of it happening whatsoever. I’d long since moved on to other stuff.
Of course, that might have been because I’d finally GOTTEN regular Toonami again. It feels like a lot longer when I just go by my memories, but by late 2001 we’d moved again and actually HAD cable at the new place. Needless to say, I was quite happy to finally, FINALLY have a regular daily dose of Toonami without having to drive across the state to visit some relative. I remember Zoids being the new hotness right around this time, along with the usual Dragon Ball regimen, though I do seem to recall being turned off by the presence of Batman Beyond. I probably explained myself as being unhappy by the presence of some lame WESTERN cartoon on the schedule, but it was probably more my residual bitterness over the whole Kids WB debacle. That’s probably also why I remember being fairly horrified when Hamtaro turned up on the line-up. Yeah, I know it’s the cool thing now to ironically/unironically like Hamtaro, and I don’t HATE the show myself, but after suffering through the indignity of the Kids WB version, I just had an immediate kneejerk reaction to seeing such an obvious little kid’s show on a supposed action show block. Even now, it’s hard to sort out what was legitimate concern and what was “I’M A SERIOUS OTAKU NOW” grandstanding, but it definitely bothered me.
What DIDN’T bother me was finally discovering Toonami: Midnight Run. Yeah, the whole “only watching at other people’s houses” thing wouldn’t have been very conducive to this anyway, but the later chunk of my time without cable mean that I totally missed out on the fact that Toonami had a late-night edgier brother. This after-hours edition of Toonami was originally just a longer rerun block of the same stuff Toonami was showing during the day, but by the time I found out about it, it had morphed into a sort of Adult Swim before Adult Swim. As more and more of the anime selections hit headlong against the content restrictions of Cartoon Network proper, this late night block allowed some of these shows to air with at least SOME of their blood and cursing intact. But that’s not finally got this particular block on my radar. No, what got ME was when, just as I was starting to get used to the new house and having cable TV again, Toonami started airing commercials for Midnight Run: Special Edition. This was a special they apparently aired several times throughout the year, that just showed off a bunch of animated music videos. Not the usual in-house techno creations full of sound bites from Toonami shows (though they did air a few of those) but real music videos by real bands, namely all the Gorillaz videos that existed at that point, plus the first four videos from what would eventually become Insterstella 5555. I’d heard of Gorillaz and I’d heard of Daft Punk, but this was the first time I’d ever seen more than just clips of any of these videos, so that a pretty darn big deal for me. Actually, it was TWO pretty darn big nights, because I initially got the date wrong and accidentally stayed up for this strange new thing Cartoon Network had just started up called “Adult Swim.” That night was the first time I ever saw Cowboy Bebop and, no offence to Daman Albarn, but that turned out to be a MUCH bigger influence on my life than Gorillaz.
And actually, that marked the ironic beginning of the end. At long last, after years of longing, I FINALLY had regular daily access to real, actual Toonami… and I was starting to loose interest. I mean, don’t misunderstand, I was watching Dragon Ball Z religiously by this point. I would never really classify myself as a “fan” of DBZ, but you gotta admit that few shows have or will ever master that “Well, I at least need to see how THIS pays off” cliffhanger formula. Still, the more anime became available in its pure, undiluted form, the more the dubbed/edited nature of Toonami began to wear a bit thin for me. Don’t worry, I wasn’t QUITE as militantly anti-dub as a lot of kids in those days, but I did get where they were coming from. It’s fitting that Toonami ever so briefly had Cardcaptors on the lineup, as the surprise failure of the the Cardcaptors dub to outsell the subbed Card Captor Sakura nicely spelled out the problems Toonami was about to face. Like so much of the 00s-era Anime Industry, Toonami’s increasing success inadvertently set up its own obsolescence. The bigger the anime audience got, the more companies stepped up to cater to them, which made un-cut anime easier to find, which made kids’ TV blocks like Toonami less necessary. Who had time to settle for a neutered version anymore?
While I’d always known blocks like Toonami had to edit stuff, it never REALLY hit me until Yu Yu Hakusho joined the schedule. I’d never seen YYH before and had no expectations going in, but MAN was it obvious they’d gone to town on that show. I’ve since heard that the original plan was to show it on the ever-expanding Adult Swim, and it was originally edited accordingly, but then the powers that be changed their minds at the eleventh hour, necessitating a whole second round of re-cuts at the very last minute. And man, it shows. Even if you don’t know how much a show like Yu Yu Hakusho is a rough fit for a timeslot like Toonami, you can still REALLY tell where things were cut drastically and sloppily. So, so, SO many awkward pauses and clunky lines and things that don’t make sense yet have to be there to fill in the space where something naughty was removed (two words: “Nice uniform.”) Again, I was never really a fan of YYH one way or the other, but I was enough of a fan of anime in general to know I wanted to see these shows the way they were made, not the way a certain TV channel could get away with showing at a certain hour.
And then there was Giant Robot Week. Now, full disclosure, this was one of my favorite things Toonami ever did. In case you haven’t caught on, mecha are right up there with spaceships as my favorite things about anime, so doing a week-long showcase on top of the regular programming is automatically going to get on my good side. I don’t even mind the fact that they could only show a few episodes of the given shows, since unlike Kids WB Toonami, Giant Robot Week was totally upfront about this just being a sample showcase of anime you could go check out for yourself later. Admittedly, it WAS pretty funny that they decided to represent Robotech with its first episode, and then its last two… which means they were ACTUALLY showing the first episode of Macross, then the final two episodes of Mospeada. That’s just hilarious to me. Still, it got the likes of Nadesico and Evangelion on national television, that’s gotta count for something.
But that’s also where the problems lay. They aired Neon Genesis Evangelion. On a children’s network. At 4:30 in the afternoon. That’s the same time where Kids WB used to air Animaniacs. You can imagine how this would have proved a problem. I can’t remember if I’d actually seen raw, original Evangelion at this point or not, but I could DEFINITELY tell they’d had to clean things up a bit. I’ve since heard some real horror stories about the Cartoon Network folks struggling to get these obviously-not-intended-for-children shows into an acceptable form to be aired in Toonami’s earliest hour. And that’s the thing: back in the days when a block like Toonami was the only place most of us could ever see anime, that was an acceptable sacrifice. But at the same time that Giant Robot Week aired, we had a brand new video game/movie rental store open up in town that had an anime section. While I can’t remember if I actually saw it first, I know I EVENTUALLY watched all of Evangelion by renting it from that place. If I could get the original, uncut version of the show just a couple miles from my house, why did I need to put up with an edited dub on TV? The more DVDs became common place and online streaming got better, the more the likes of Toonami just seemed unnecessary. Heck, even Cartoon Network itself would contribute to the problem as Adult Swim increased its anime output. I may never have seen the Midnight Run versions of any Toonami shows, but I definitely know that watching Yu Yu Hakusho and Evangelion in their Adult Swim forms was waaaaay more satisfying than the Toonami cuts.
Looking back at this point, it becomes pretty clear that I never had as much of a sense of personal investment in Toonami as a lot of other folks my age did. I definitely liked it, and appreciated it as a means of getting anime, but by this period it becomes pretty clear that my allegiance was to the shows themselves, not the presentation. Maybe it’s because I’d seen enough Moltar to not automatically think of TOM as “the” Toonami host the way others did. Maybe all those long stretches where I couldn’t watch Toonami every day kept me from imprinting on the block itself as hard as others. Maybe the Kids WB fiasco poisoned the well a bit. Maybe I just didn’t like the big bulky muscular TOM they introduced later on as much as squat, big-head TOM, I dunno. The point is, as the original weekday incarnation of Toonami wore down, I found myself watching less and less, being too busy getting my anime from other sources. In fact, I don’t think I was even paying attention when the afternoon block was taken over by Miguzi.
Oh, but we do have to talk about Miguzi for a second, because I absolutely DO remember being instantly turned off when I discovered that they HAD bumped Toonami for it. Like, I guess the whole “color underwater monsters” theme fit the shows Miguzi ended up showing; I can’t really imagine Tom introducing The Life and Times of Juniper Lee. But I also didn’t WATCH most of the shows Miguzi ended up showing. I wasn’t interested in Mucha Lucha or Xaolin Showdown, and even with the handful of shows I WAS interested in like Teen Titans, I’d usually watch them at times when doing so DIDN’T require being constantly assaulted by some of the ugliest CG on TV. That’s the main thing I remember about Miguzi: how utterly TERRIBLE the critters in the bumpers looked. Toonami’s use of robots and spaceships and shiny metallic objects worked well for a low-budget TV production, but Miguzi’s attempt at a more organic, natural setting was a complete failure. And heck, the one human girl in the cast was EASILY the most terrifying. That big-eyed creature was the stuff of creepypastas, man.
Of course, Toonami didn’t end with the arrival of Miguzi, not yet. Rather, it was bumped from a weekday afternoon slot to a weekend evening one. At first, this was basically just plain of Toonami, just on a Saturday, and even less interesting. Yeah, by this point there REALLY wasn’t much of anything on Toonami that held any interest for me anymore. While I freely admit to reading the Naruto manga, the anime never attracted my interest in the slightest, ESPECIALLY with how ear-bleeding Naruto’s English voice was. And with the rest of the schedule regularly dominated by the likes of Zatch Bell or Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, that only lessened my interest even more. Honestly, this may be the point where I first started to curdle into the bitter jaded old otaku you see before you today. Do you really think the guy who was excited to see Nadesico or Dai-Guiard on Toonami would have any interest whatsoever in Duel Masters, Bakugan, or Rave Master? Heck, I didn’t even like One Piece, which pretty much means the entire lineup had nothing for me.
And if that wasn’t enough, 2007 also brought probably the most drastic rebranding since TOM took over from Moltar, and while I’ve got finished talking about how I didn’t really have that much of an attachment to the classic Toonami look one way or the other, I’ll freely admit that I HATE this version of Toonami as well. While the host was still referred to as TOM and still had Steve Blum’s voice, it wasn’t the blue visor-faced ‘bot anymore. Instead, this TOM was one of a team of VERY ugly little gray-faced robots with visible eyes and mouths. They weren’t as terrifyingly ugly as the Miguzi girl, but they also weren’t the least bit memorable or likable. Frankly, they all look like they wandered out of some South American knock-off version of Thomas the Tank Engine. The setting of the bumpers changed as well, swapping The Absolution out for a really boring planetary instillation called Flowus 3, a major downgrade. Aside from the fact that Flowus 3 looks almost as less cool than its predecessor as TOM 4, the basic idea of a stationary base of operations just isn’t anywhere near as cool as a ship flying around space. That whole idea of Toonami as a roving band of pirate broadcasters was really neat, and while I wouldn’t have tuned in solely to see that, I can absolutely notice when it’s replaced with something demonstrably more lame. And I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so, as Saturday night Toonami’s ratings apparently just got worse and worse the longer it went on. If nothing else, at least visor-less TOM didn’t stick around too long.
For all the milestones of Toonami’s lifespan that I missed, it’s weird that somehow managed to actually catch its final Saturday night airing totally by chance. I hadn’t heard anything about the block being canceled, and they hadn’t added anything new that interested me more (the final lineup was just Naruto, Ben 10, and Samurai Jack). I think I was just planning to watch the new episode of Bleach on Adult Swim and tuned in early. All of a sudden, there’s visor-less TOM saying his final goodbye, quoiting The Doors and referencing Cowboy Bebop and everything. And I gotta be honest… I didn’t care. My tastes had moved so far away from what Toonami had been airing, and Toonami itself had moved so far away from the block I’d seen back in the day, that hearing it was gone honestly didn’t affect me whatsoever. Maybe if I HAD developed more of an attachment to the actual Toonami block itself rather than just the shows it presented, then the thought of it passing at all might have hit me somewhat But as it was, I just watched Bleach like normal and went to bed. Adult Swim had long since replaced Toonami as my anime hook-up, and even that had dwindled pretty severely by this point. In fact, there’s probably a whole blog to be written about THAT sometime in the future…
Of course, that wasn’t the ACTUAL end of Toonami. On April 1st 2012, Adult Swim teased everyone with their traditional April Fools airing of The Room, only to swap things out for a night of anime with good old-fashioned Toonami bumpers. It went over well. Really well. Like, EXTREMELY well. I didn’t see any of it at the time, I was up in DC by this point and had officially entered the “Post-TV” phase of my life, but I absolutely remember hearing what a massive ruckus the geek world made over Toonami making a return. And obviously, Cartoon Network heard too, because Toonami was actually back for real on Saturday nights by the end of May. And you know what? In the nine years that have passed since they brought Toonami back, I think I’ve only actually watched it once. Again, I’m thoroughly Post-TV now. If I wanna watch an anime, I’ll just go watch that anime. I don’t got time to sit around waiting for some network to pick it up and air it dubbed and edited. Life’s too short for that. And again, I just don’t have the same nostalgic connection to the IDEA of Toonami as the people who tune in every week to watch it now, especially since I’ve long since gotten over my infatuation with anime in general enough to realize there’s only certain shows I actually care about… and it ain’t any of the stuff they’re airing now. It’s not even that I have anything against the likes of Black Clover or Assassination Classroom or Demon Slayer. For me to have something to dislike, I’d have to actually watch them, but for that to happen I’d have to have any flickering of interest in them to begin with. And I don’t. Looking over the recent Toonami schedules, the only show that’s ever actually grabbed my interest is SSSS.Gridman, and I’ve been able to watch that without Toonami’s help. For someone like me who ultimately just saw Toonami as a vehicle for accessing anime, there’s just no reason for it anymore.
And as long as I’m being depressingly honest, the more I’ve looked back over the old clips of Toonami for this blog, the more the cracks in the façade have really started to show. The repetitiveness of the same old CG shots over and over again, the obviousness of different audio being dubbed over the same TOM clips, the realization that WOW there was actually a lot of shows on Toonami that I never watched, it’s really kind of adding up. Also, while I’ve bigged up blocks like Toonami for throwing in extra segments and features to make it feel more all-consuming, actually going back and WATCHING these shorts was a bit of a let down. TOM was never gonna be the next great video games reviewer, let me tell ya. What’s more, I was surprised by just how negatively I reacted to seeing all those speeches and editorials Toonami liked to throw in. Somebody at Williams Street really wanted to be a motivational speaker, but watching it now was a MAJOR turn-off. I mean, come on. At the end of the day, TOM is just a trademarked mascot for some network’s piece of corporate branding. I’m not going to take life advice from an aspiring Happy Meal prize. Anybody who legitimately finds inspiration from a cartoon character filling time before the next commercial break deserves all the disillusionment they’re receive later in life.
And yet, even with all that snarky cynicism, I’m glad I spent today digging around YouTube to watch old Toonami clips. For better and for worse, it was certainly a nostalgic experience. And this was just the stuff I actually remembered watching myself. I haven’t even said anything about all the online comics or Total Immersion Events they did. Yeah, for as big a deal as those original series and specials were, I don't think I ever actually saw ANY of them when they came out. Maybe those would have made a more favorable impression on me than the cringy video game reviews? I dunno. And of course, I never even mentioned spinoffs like Toonami: Rising Sun or any of the international uses of the name since, again, I never saw any of that. This isn’t supposed to be a conclusive retrospective of the entire Toonami brand, just my scattershot memories of watching what I watched when I watched. And GOOD LORD did this turn out longer than I expected. Looks like I really did have more Toonami memories than I realized. If nothing else, it’s reminded me all over again what a voice acting treasure C. Martin Croker was. Moltar’s voice really was pretty awesome.
