Toonami

April 1. Playing Dungeons and Dragons, of course. Because it was that Saturday night/Sunday morning. I was reading tweets when I saw something very interesting trending: Toonami. The thing that brought me into anime was trending on Twitter for some reason. I found out a few seconds later that it was because adult swim, instead of airing The Room again, aired Toonami. With Steve Blum. And Tom. And new vignettes featuring Tom.

A few days later, Steve Blum himself launched a massive (in the scope of anime at least) Twitter campaign asking fans to bombard adult swim and Cartoon Network to #BringBackToonami. Guess what? May 16, adult swim announced that it was bringing back Toonami starting May 26. In their words, #ToonamisBackBitches.

Toonami, along with Cartoon Network and Fox Kids, is what got me into anime. Shows like Dragonball Z, Digimon, YuYu Hakusho, and Pokémon drew me in more than any American show I’ve seen before. Of course, I didn’t know that it was any different than, say, Johnny Bravo or Rocket Power at the time. I just thought they were cool cartoons. They’re still cool cartoons, but what’s most important about Toonami coming back isn’t the rush of nostalgia that comes to every 20-something Joe Shmoe tweeting about it. What’s important is what this means for anime.

An entirely new generation of early teens will now be exposed to new shows like Casshern Sins and Deadman Wonderland and old classics like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell. Bebop and GitS were on the block for god knows how long, and are still running now on adult swim. What’s big is that anime dubs are going to be first seen on TV instead of streaming through Funimation or Viz or whoever. This is probably the first a new anime dub is being featured outside adult swim since Naruto Shippuden. The last new dubs featured on TV first might have been Durarara!! and Fullmetal Alchemsit: Brotherhood, but I’m fairly sure those got a DVD release either simultaneous with the first episode airing or before the first episode aired (as in, the first set of Durarara!! was out when the first episode was airing, and same with Brotherhood).

What I experienced for the first time in a VERY LONG time when Toonami was on for April Fool’s was watching a new anime on TV. It was Blue Submarine No. 6, which I had of course never seen before, and it stunned me to see how interested I was in it at 4 in the morning. Any other time, I would have just said, “eh,” and moved on to watch it later. TV, now, can be a big outlet for people who have never seen anime before to watch new anime. Newer than GitS and Bebop. Something shiny like Deadman Wonderland or Casshern Sins.

The key here, for adult swim, is marketing. They can’t just do their normal bullcrap of airing commercials for their shows. They have to give Tom the right to satirize their shows to promote them, AND to advertise other anime and air advertisements for those (the ones that aren’t airing anywhere). This, of course, is going to be a lot of logistics between adult swim, Funimation, Viz, Sentai Filmworks, and any other company that wants their ads on Toonami. But it’ll be worth it because it will expose a whole generation of teens to anime.

There is, of course, another side to this. The Twitter storm was noticed because people are already at their computers or even phones and can tweet at adult swim when they’re nowhere near a computer. If everyone who sent a tweet were to watch adult swim, I believe that Toonami’s expectations would go above and beyond. But this is Saturday night/Sunday morning we’re talking about here. Their biggest audience is, let’s face it, us late teens and 20-somethings that watched Toonami when it was on back in 2008 and before. But we’re late teens and 20-somethings. In all likelihood, we’re out partying somewhere, getting drunk before we’re supposed to, age wise, or holding down a full time job, possibly with kids. We don’t have the time or energy to stay up past 11 at night on any given day.

For this to succeed, it’ll have to get ratings. They don’t have to be Lost finale or Super Bowl ratings. But they have to be equal to what adult swim typically gets in that time slot. But we’re, of course, shooting for what adult swim got that April Fool’s Day.

I’m frequently pessimistic in these kinds of situations, but I really don’t know whether this experiment will be a success for adult swim. I hope to dear god that it will be because, as I’ve said, it’ll expose a whole generation to new anime. But I’m honestly leaning toward “it’ll fail.”

I guess we’ll see. Until then, stay golden, I guess.