Thoughtnami™

A long time ago, I first watched an MGM short directed by Chuck Jones, The Bear That Wasn't. The 1967 short, based on a 1946 children's book by director and animator Frank Tashlin, was about a bear who, after awakening from hibernation, finds himself in the middle of a busy city and a building site. The bear is mistaken for a worker by a foreman on the site and protests that he's not a human. The foreman tells him he's just a silly man in a fur coat who needs a shave and demands him to go to work right on the spot, which the bear reluctantly does much to his protests. The bear tries to plead his case only to be repeated the same line over and over again that he's just a silly man in a fur coat who needs a shave. The bear is also told he's not really a bear because he's not in a cage in a zoo with other bears. This causes the bear to just surrender to what people have told him and decides to just accept it.  Months pass, and he finds himself uncomfortable in ...

I don't do posts like this often, so forgive the brief promotional break. Think of this as a pledge break segment like they do on public television in the States.  (You totally should support your local public media outlets if you can) I'm currently a freelance creator on a very, very fixed income. Haven't really gotten many professional gigs lately (still waiting for payment for a job I did a couple of weeks ago before my keyboard broke on me) and considering I'm also a caregiver, I can't really leave home for lengthy periods of time.   If you like what I do around these parts, various social outlets (I'm mostly on BlueSky and the site formerly branded as Twitter ), and on Quora  (where I answer a lot of questions), you could always support me.  If you want to send me a financial tip, you could send me one via PayPal . Every little bit helps out with groceries and medicine and other expenses that come up. If you want to send me a gift, you could send me o...

Continuing where we left off , I have to acknowledges that Adult Swim seems to be the home of originals on Cartoon Network, and they’re investing in a lot of original programming. Toonami is a home for a lot of those action-packed originals. Granted the first batch of originals, most of which were co-produced with other partners including Crunchyroll, came and went barely moving the needle. Blade Runner: Black Lotus ,  Fena: Pirate Princess, and Shenmue the Animation will likely never see the light of day again. Housing Complex C lasted as long as a sneeze and just as memorable as one. Toonami had more luck with the four FLCL “sequels” and Ninja Kamui, the latter of which had very good numbers during its run in Spring 2024. As Kamui was winding down, Toonami began pushing another high-profile project. No, it wasn’t Uzumaki , which had been delayed numerous times since it was initially announced in 2019 mostly because of the COVID-19 epidemic that’s still going on and various o...

Previously, I talked about how the anime marketplace has changed dramatically and limits what Toonami can and can't pick up. That's not to say they don't air newer shows.  It's just a little harder to get, and sometimes, you have to pick up more reliable fare that fans already love. As much as people don't want to admit or accept it, nostalgia works for Toonami. The only thing about nostalgia is that you can't fully embrace it if you want to survive. Toonami currently airs a small handful of shows from the major distributors, but they’re not as plentiful as they once were. They'll get a high-profile show every once in a blue moon like Lycoris Recoil,   Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, or infrequent cycles of Demon Slayer (by the way, the Swordsman Village arc will premiere on Toonami on August 10), but they're already second-run shows by the time they hit the block, not US premieres. Again, that’s partially the fault of the marketplace limiting what...

It's San Diego Comic Con weekend, and a lot is happening all at once.  Of course, even before SDCC even started, there was a lot of uncertainty about a lot of things involving Warner Bros Discovery as a whole. I'm not going to talk in-depth about the company as a whole in this three-part article, but, rather, a part of the Adult Swim block that I'm particularly interested in, the Toonami action block. With all this noise about Toonami lacking major anime acquisitions, shows originally intended for Cartoon Network migrating to the block instead, the upcoming premieres of several highly-anticipated shows including one that seemingly felt like a lifetime in the making and another that nobody really asked for, and rumors of the Warner Bros Discovery domestic linear channels being bundled together with over $35 billion in debt and spun off from the rest of the company, one has to wonder what exactly is the current state of Toonami right at this moment. The short answer?  Conside...

Storytime, folks. Or, rather, dream time, folks. A rather weird dream, mind you. It's a bit rambling, but I had to write it down for prosperity and to understand it in full.  Try not to make something of it. Here we go: I had a dream last night about going downtown to get a pizza from a huge restaurant. I had called it in and expected to wait a while for it. Fifteen minutes passed. Then, 30 minutes. An hour passed & I kind of gotten impatient waiting for one pizza. I asked the lady who was the cashier in the parlor what was happening with my order throughout the day. She wasn't bad on the eyes, mind you, so I had to play it cool, but you had to understand my frustrations. The first 15 minutes, she was cordial and sweet. After 30 minutes, she was fine. An hour passed, and she was just belligerent, flustered, and angry at me for pestering her. She just told me that I had to wait a little longer for the one pizza. Did I mention that there were only two people in this parlor be...

Over the last couple of days, a hashtag popped up across social media prompting a lot of attention not only from animation fans and creators around the globe but also the media at large who were wondering about why it caught fire so fast.  The hashtag in question?  #RIPCartoonNetwork The hashtag, launched on July 8, 2024, by The Animation Guild, blew up across all social media platforms and encouraged fans of the channel to talk about their favorite Cartoon Network shows that they wish they could see again or wish would have stayed on a little long.  God knows there are a lot of those. Various news outlets picked up the story, from the usual news outlets like  Yahoo ,  Bleeding Cool,  even international news sites to places that don't regularly cover animation like  Men's Journal ,  Creative Bloq , and others. Cartoon Network themselves (at the time of this writing) hasn't made any official statement on social media about the hashtag beyond the um...

As you may be aware if you're following me on social media, I’m currently working on a follow-up to The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time , a 1994 book written by Jerry Beck showcasing the best animated shorts ever made. Needless to say, I have a lot to cover and 30 years of new shorts to consider. I’m creating a list of 100 shorts rather than 50 because I wanted to celebrate first 110 years of the medium from 1914 to 2024, from the golden age to the Saturday morning era to the cable boom and Animation renaissance to the rise of the internet and streaming.  My main list of 100 is fairly set in stone. I know what's in my top 10. I know what's my #1 choice.   That said, I want to see other perspectives and voices, and I want to gauge other people’s tastes in the medium.  I'm currently contacting as many folks as I can who love animation as much as I do. Fans of American cartoons, fans of anime, Disney fans, Looney Tunes fans, Hanna-Barbera fans, golden age cartoons fans...

 A long, long time ago, I made a bucket list of sorts of goals I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40. This was made the day before I turned 34. Two years had passed between the first mention of the list and the last time I talked about it .  A lot has happened in that time.  A lot. In fact, the first three things on my original list got shaken up dramatically. I lost the love I found unexpectedly in January 2022. When she died, the goals of marrying her and starting a family with her were evaporated too, so, I just looked at those remaining goals with tear-soaked eyes and felt it was pointless to even try them.  As I mentioned before, the remainer of 2022 feeling cursed, frustrated, angry, and alone. The world was changing for the worse, and I still have anxieties about a lot of things. But I have to have hope because I'm still here. And I still have things I need to do. At the time of THIS writing, I'm 46, so a good 12 years have passed. I’m blessed. I ha...