Goodbye Toonami, 1997-2008
 

Tonight was Toonami's final airing. Honestly, I don't watch it anymore but it's still a little sad to see it go. I remember when I would come home from Middle School in the late 90s and would be excited to see new episodes of Dragon Ball Z at 5 pm.

Toonami helped spark my interest in anime by showing me my first uncut anime, Gundam Wing during its Midnight Run. Toonami was pretty decent until they moved it to Saturday nights and replaced it with that shitty Miguzi.

Toonami Arsenal has the goodbye clip, it's not much but they get the point across.

Sorry, Toonami has been dead ever since the move to Saturday nights only and when CN decided the people that were watching it were above their target demographic (why the Kenshin runs were so half-assed). But yeah, good times, coming home from classes and looking forward to some really awesome shows (especially during a time when American animation was -and still is- mired in a deep slump of garbage).

Besides the showings of DBZ during the aforementioned time, they also aired the first half of Ronin Warriors and they even did a run of Escaflowne. When they moved it to Saturday nights and did the uncut thing, they started showing Yu Yu Hakusho too.

Peace out, Tom and the Toonami crew. lol That means Steve Blum's lost his job as Tom's VA. Sad :(

When they killed Tom 2, they killed Toonami.

Toonami was shit, all anime is shit, this is CN's best decision. Tom burns in robot Hell.

LMAO, WHOA, FAT FAT. Self-loathing? REALLY?

I watched it for Sailor Moon. Toonami was garbage after SM's last showing.

I remember it best for Outlaw Star back when I was in middle school. Sure they cut out an episode, but that was still nice to come home to every day.

Even though I haven't watched Toonami in ages, I happened to flip by Cartoon Network tonight just as they said it was the end of their last run. It's a little sad to see it go after all these years, but Steve Blum ending it with "bang" was pretty great.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. For every show worth watching (Thundercats, Voltron, Astroboy Big-O), Toonami featured two that were garbage. All the segment ever truly did was foster a seething plague of otaku behaviors and corrupt all that was excellent about Western animation. Before Toonami, anime was something you had to order through a catalog and watch in private, like porn.

Now, thanks to Toonami's demon influence upon impressionable children, we're beset by a generation of dipshits who think Yu-Gi-Oh and Ben 10 are what passes for quality cartoons. They wear their asinine Naruto headbands as the rest of us would wear a Mets cap, traipsing around like some kind of emo samurai. And the networks have no choice now but to pander to this idiot demographic. Gone are the days of awesome shows like Animaniacs, Alvin & the Chipmunks, Rocko's Modern Life, The Tick and Thundercats. No, thanks to the anime explosion Toonami helped create, kids today are handed shitfests like Chop Socky Chooks and Robot Boy. Future generations will fondly reminisce about Cardcaptors and Jackie Chan Adventures, and this greatly saddens me.

So thanks a lump, Cartoon Network. You've destroyed the landscape of the foundation upon which you were built. This news is ten years too late. Maybe we can finally move beyond this Japan fad and get back to producing shows that aren't about teenage ninjas who collect cards to save alternate dimensions from giant mechabots.

Yeah, needs more good old all-American shows, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Speed Racer

<- liked Jackie Chan Adventures. Stereotypically racist & abusive old men are my favorite kind of old men.

CN's been producing SOME good new shows, at least. Flapjack is pretty sweet.

Additional Spam:
are you serious

Do you even know where TMNT comes from?

Haha, the irony there isn't lost on me, Blah. I'm well aware that many series I hold fondly close to heart were, in fact, produced in Japan. But nevertheless, there's been a significant drop in quality since the days of TMNT, G.I.Joe and Silverhawks. I'm not calling all animes crap - there are some that even I like - I just blame CN for homogenizing animation styles to the point where...well, where we are now. Stuff like Naruto and Ben 10 doesn't really stand up to the material we had even only a decade ago.

I love cartoons. I'm a walking encyclopedia (Dubble and I could write a book). There ARE good ones being made but they're becoming rarities amidst a sea of junk trying to pass itself off with a pseudo-anime appearance. This genuinely bothers me. I'm happy to see Toonami end because it means that perhaps the industry will soon attempt to try something different finally.

my point is that it's an American franchise, it's like disqualifying Batman: The Animation because it was animated by Koreans


Be for real, though, Crash, looking at the past through rose tinted glasses everything seems better. Thundercats and He-Man only seem cool because we were kids but anybody with a sense of taste (adults) wouldn't watch it Clockwork Orange-rigged.

Ben 10 is a better show than the average Saturday lineup from 10-20 years ago, and cool shows like Animaniacs and Freakazoid! only existed because Steven Spielberg had an interest in animation and was looking for a quality reminiscent of 30s-50s era Warner Brothers.

I mean, a lot of new cartoons are really shitty, but besides stuff that is objectively bad (Robot Boy, Beyblade) have you ever thought that a lot of this shit is terrible because the intended audience is children?

Woah woah, Wait a minute: Toonami was still alive?

Tom's Goodbye

"Bang"

Sorry, but anime has absolutely nothing to do with the sloppy and downright ugly "original" shows that CN has been springing on us the last ten years. As amateur efforts, as an aside from the usual, they were nice (and I love Cow and Chicken...Dexter and Johnny Bravo got old fast). As the basis of an entire network and as more of these things than I could keep track of started spawning and as all the "classic" cartoons were removed to make room for them...yuck. I really haven't watched more than 10 hours total of CN since Miguzi started (and I don't get Boomerang).

As an aside, I'm not really a huge fan of Adult Swim's anime offerings (Case Closed/Conan, Cowboy Bebop and Lupin being exceptions when they ran...Inuyasha had moments, but didn't really hold my interest). I tended to prefer the stuff from Toonami in its' prime.

You're a monster.

They're not bad shows, they just look like they were made on a shoestring budget (like so much of CN's original properties) and the jokes were constantly recycled. I didn't think they had enough steam to survive more than a season. They were definitely among the best "WHAT. A. CARTOON."'s, if that makes you feel any better...

I'd like to hear your opinion and the opinion of others on Re-Boot.

I don't think Toonami was anything special, and certainly not worth mourning the loss of, even if it gave certain programs that deserved a second life the attention they deserved.

My opinion of Reboot is already known. I personally hated it. But this was for a completely different set of reasons than those for which I disliked the faux-anime shows. Reboot just wasn't funny.

I probably shouldn't have lumped it together with Speed Racer, but I was pointing out that even though it's American by origin, it contained ninjas, nunchucks, karate senseis, samurais and robots.

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/5...65thumbgh0.jpg

Additional Spam:
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8...ami0003cr5.jpg

No not really, because they were great and survived well into their run.

What really gets me is that nobody wants to care to mention Johnny Test, which is a show produced by a network that rips off another intellectual property of the network only with reversed gender roles.

Reminds me of the time two years ago when I decided, on a whim, to rewatch the Super Mario Brothers super show. God, what a travesty that was, and to think that I actually enjoyed watching it when I was 7 or 8.

Still, I'd have to agree with the comment about Animaniacs, Freakazoid, and all the others mentioned. Those were the last days of American animation and it pretty much ended with the grittiness of Batman Beyond. The times where I stop to check out American cartoons in the last 8 years have resulted in me turning the other way since it just wasn't appealing.