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Adult Swim Revamps; Removes Most Anime
E. Megas writes "According to a Collegiate Presswire story, Cartoon Network (Probably due to its recent acquisition of Futurama) is expanding its Adult Swim schedule to Monday through Thursday starting January 12th. The "Comedy" block on Sundays will stay, but except for Inu-Yasha and Cowboy Bebop (Which will replace the Toonami Midnight Run block on the weekday slots) the Saturday "Action" block will be gone. This means that the legendary series Mobile Suit Gundam will not be aired in full for the second time in a row on CN. Future airings of Yuu Yuu Hakusho and Outlaw Star-And the planned re-airing of Gundam 0080: War In the Pocket-Are thrown into doubt by this decision as well. More schedule details in the article. (Anyone else as frustrated by this as I am?)"
I would care if any of the stuff on CN wasn't dubed/edited to death
I'm pretty damn fond of anime, but no TV series has ever done it for me and most just down right piss me off(Dragonball Z, or anything with big eye'd overly-cartoonish characters). If I need a fix, I'll throw in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, which is my new favorite, even above Ghost in the Shell or Akira.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
I wonder if this is a sign that Anime has peaked. The Action channel (Encore) quietly killed their dedicated anime line-up, though they still have it, and now Cartoon Network is removing theirs.
Maybe there's not enough viewer support for broadcast anime, as opposed to just buying it off of DVD...
Then you should try the short shift we get on Australian CN. Anime at the moment is just repeats of Gundam Wing, DBZ, the two Zoid series and Neon Gen. The newest stuff we have had is Zoids: CC. No Tenchi, no 08th team. While I feel your pain, you have it good!
It's probably for the best. This will encourage me to actually go out and buy the DVDs for the shows I like, rather than just tape them off of CN. (And no cutting that way, too)
:P
Plus, Futurama will find a new home. It is a very underappreciated show, and I'm glad it can be shown somewhere were it will won't be constantly preempted by sports.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
I don't know much about Cartoon Network over in the states, but here in the UK things are actually improving. We now have an extra channel 'CNX' which shows a lot of anime stuff, some live-action movies (lot of hong-kong action movies) and the more adult cartoons that they wouldn't put on the regular channels.
As far as I know, Cowboy Bebop has never been shown in the UK before this channel.
Well, much of it comes down to a simple dub-sub debate which would really be totally off topic. It seems to be the tendency of the companies that cartoon network either contracts or purchases their anime from to dumb down the translations ridiculously (not that Outlaw Star is particularly thought-provoking).
Secondly, I'm annoyed when I don't get to see the artists original intent, irregardless of how small a modification that might be. It doesn't hurt that naked anime girls are part of the original intent, admittedly, but it's amazing how a few subtle (and not so subtle) edits and translations can completely change the meaning of any given work of art.
Case in point: Sailor Moon. Not originally the kids show it is here.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
The Johnny Quest episode
The Flinstones episode
The Scooby episode
The Jabberjaw episode
The Yogi episode
The Superfriends episode
And that's it. I've seen them all about a zillion times. It's the same story with Sealab and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There are only 13 episodes of both those shows, and I've seen them all so many times that I have become sick of the shows. The episodes are 10 minutes long and use cheap animation tactics. You wouldn't think it would be too hard to produce some new episodes every now and then.
Gundam is probably as close to legendary as any anime series can be. It radically altered the whole climate for SF anime. Perhaps it would be better to call it seminal or groundbreaking, but it was certainly very important in the development of the genre.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
1) Adult Swim Action couldn't possibly have had worse promotion. Note: squeezing as many action clips as possible into 30 seconds does not a good commercial make. That synth-voice sucked. And a little cross-network advertising that actually targeted the right people would have been nice (Sci-fi good, CNN bad, stoopid).
2) The shows they picked could have been better. Specifically, they could have been for adults, and furthermore shouldn't have been edited down to a pre-teen level. Things might have gone rather differently if they had Hellsing or Excel Saga or Hajime no Ippo headlining (provided the dubs don't suck - I don't know).
3) The Inu Yasha dub sucks terribly, for a headlining show. Pilot Candidate sucks, period - I was changing the channel with extreme prejudice when that came on. MS Gundam is interesting from a historical standpoint, but not much else. OS and Tenchi had already been shown way too much already.
4) I wonder how many times they'll re-run Cowboy Bebop before they realize that adults, unlike kids, tend not to watch shows ad infinitum. This is the problem with ALL CN shows, and especially with AS. At the very least, they could run a show all the way through (anime series are almost all ~13 or ~26 episodes long) in a prime time slot once, then switch to a new series, and eventually rerunning it in a less watched time slot for the rest. Of course they best way would be to run it once in a blue moon and make it an event, and show LOTS of series.
5) Anime != Action. Tenchi is not action (nor is Sailor Moon over in Toonami). Anime covers a broad spectrum of genres and is generally marketed to specific target demographics. Grouping shows by genres is bad - it makes people compare. Grouping shows by demographic is good - it ensures people keep watching. No demographic wants to watch for more than 2 hrs, and most will watch for only 1.
6) I can barely stay up 'til one, even on Saturday, and am rarely in the mood to watch 3 hrs of programming at a time. Also, Saturday night happens to be when a very large chunk of the AS demographic has better things to do, like appeasing the girlfriend or going to a LAN party. It's an awful time slot. (For the record, I think a better pattern would be for 1hr per night Su-Th, with different shows targeting different demographics each night, like prime time on the networks but shorter. I.E. adults can just tune in at a certain time and something new for them will be on. Unfortunately late night is hard to program through, with the Midnight Run conflicting, The Daily Show competing, and Bed calling.)
7) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. ASA had little problem attracting the hardcore geek contingent. It might've survived if they tried attracting other people too.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
You're sounding like a troll. And anime is going mainstream, but it isn't anywhere near there yet. Until I see sorority girls wearing Sailor Moon T-shirts and Ford trucks with Kogepan pissing on a Chevy symbol, anime isn't mainstream.
If it weren't for Cowboy Bebop, I wouldn't be watching anime. Period. I thought it was all a cross between softcore porn and Transformers-on-steroids-and-crack. But then came Cowboy Bebop, and I got it. Then came Akira and Miyakazi's many works and Outlaw Star and Ghost In The Shell....
CN ain't the be-all end-all, but at least it got me to go into the extensive anime section of Scarecrow Video. Nice to have a world-class video store on the route home from work.
I hope CN continues to show anime, and not necessarily for the hardcore fan's benefit. There are a lot of people out there who would turn and flee if I showed up with a subbed Utena DVD, but might be willing to watch a dubbed Gundam or DBZ episode on CN. I met one guy at work the other day who told me about going to see anime at his friend's house. He was watching a single episode of a series every time he visited, and was really starting to enjoy it.
The series? Jubei-chan: Secret of the Lovely Eyepatch!
Even though most of my hardcore friends would turn up their noses at the mention of this anime, I was glad that my co-worker was watching anime in any form. If his friend is any true anime fan, he'll keep hunting and searching until he finds the series that will really pique my co-worker's interest and reel him in for good- be it Eva, Escaflowne, Ebichu...whatever!
I think CN's Adult Swim is having a definite impact on viewers, but it's probably too soon to tell. Who knows how many people they're reaching with those awful dubbed episodes of Tenchi and Yu Yu Hakusho?
"Tabemono, tabemono, arimasu ka? Nai desu ka? Arimasu ka?" - Ed
"Sailor Moon wasn't really a kids show until the editors got ahold of it."
;)
You think Sailor Moon the original is not suitable for kids ? Was it anything to do with the occasional torture, death, crucifiction of main characters, the nudity, the homosexuality or perhaps the main character being a new Messiah ?
graspee the sailor moon fan