A Dandy of a Time for Anime

I have just had a tough time getting posts out the door for Mondays lately. It’s crazy – something always comes up. Oh well, on to other, better things.

Years ago, a certain group of folks at a certain cable station set about to make you a better cartoon show. They called it “Toonami”.

That’s a paraphrasing of the tag line Toonami used when it started on Cartoon Network back in 1997, some sixteen years ago come March.

Toonami is not the first place that I watched anime.

My first anime, if my memory serves me right, was Sailor Moon. I woke up early one morning, and my sisters were watching TV. Sailor Moon was showing on whatever the NYC CW was called back then before it became the WB (think its station code is WPIX). My second anime was Cardcaptor Sakura, on the same channel.

But if not for Toonami, those would have very possibly been the only anime I ever had any exposure to. I didn’t gain an interest in researching, learning, seeking out, anime until Toonami began airing and I had the chance to watch and be entertained by a number of different anime. To put it in another way, Toonami was the gateway to anime culture. That was the case for me, and I know that was the case for many others as well.

But Toonami has not always been as reliable and effective as many remember it once being. It has bounced around the schedule a lot, moving from a simple two-hour block weekday afternoons, to a four or five block, adding a block at midnight called Midnight Run, a weekend morning block called Rising Sun, narrowing down to just a Saturday evening block, until its cancellation in 2008.

This covered much of the time before the power of the internet had even a modicum of the ability to bring anime to eyeballs whether on the TV or at their computer. As the internet’s power grew, Toonami couldn’t keep pace. Naturally, as they broadcast their programming in English language, and the source is in Japanese language, you have to go through the dubbing process. That naturally delays the broadcast very significantly relative to the original airdate on the other side of the world. Subtitled anime, however, can be put out in mere hours, or as we see today with the likes of Crunchyroll or Funimation, at the same time given enough lead-time on the entire process to allow necessary production.

When Adult Swim brought back Toonami in all its classic glory for April Fool’s Day in 2012, the Toonami faithful had mixed reaction. Some were pissed. It had been no secret that Cartoon Network as a whole, particularly Adult Swim as the anime source post Toonami, had a habit of being at the least insensitive, at worst insulting and derisive, towards anime. There was, after all, the infamous case of their choosing to broadcast a network premiere episode of Ghost in the Shell with farts playing all throughout the audio track making it all but impossible to tell what was going on. Taunting anime fans with an April Fool’s Toonami block for those people was like another slap to the face. For others, it was a glimmer of hope that Toonami would actually come back.

Well, Toonami came back, in part because of how many people flooded Twitter waxing on about their memories of Toonami and their hopes that it would make a triumphant return. But there was a salient question that remained – could Toonami survive and even thrive in the new anime landscape? As stated, more than enough people have found it easy enough to watch subtitled anime online through the various streaming sources. Would enough people be interested in watching anime weeks, months, or years after it originally aired, just with English voices attached instead of Japanese ones with subtitles? Or would the lineup, the offering, be any different than the one already there from Adult Swim?

So far, it has been good. I don’t really know that anyone would call it a blockbuster or knockout success, but Toonami has done very well. And it has come to an opportunity for a real sea-change that can make Toonami as viable, if not more so, than online distribution, in the United States.

The biggest hurdle for Toonami, as I’ve said, is that it plays only dubbed anime, not subtitled. That means that it’s usually months after an anime premieres before Toonami gets it (discounting the time needed to negotiate broadcasting rights). But there is an anime coming out in January called Space Dandy.

I’ll admit, the show is not looking terribly interesting. It is about a space traveling bounty hunter who gets paid for discovering previously unknown lifeforms. His name is Dandy. Apparently the show is labeled as a sci-fi comedy. It does have potential with the story, but the artwork suggests it may be a little too much slap-stick, too little story, for my liking. But the part that makes this show special is that it is an anime, and will be airing on Toonami before it airs in Japan at all. And it will be dubbed in English when it airs. This is a first. Hopefully it won’t be a last.

This gives Toonami back an advantage it had back in its prime – the ability to bring to American audiences anime as early as they could get it, in a form they can appreciate it. The internet took that advantage away by allowing people to watch anime subtitled. But as it stands watching the dub required waiting until the U.S release of the show on Blu-Ray or DVD, or hoping that Toonami eventually airs it.

If this works out well, it can hopefully prove to be a model for future anime releases. It would serve as a relishing treat for anime fans in the U.S and around the world to be able to get their anime fix on certain shows with a little more ease and in a more easily digestible way. And for those still more interested in seeing the show subtitled with the Japanese vocals, Funimation will simulcast the subtitled version.

I genuinely hope that this experiment works out for Toonami. I think it will be a good thing for anime fans if it does. Let’s cross our fingers and hope things go swimmingly.