Thoughtnami™

Yesterday, I talked about the end of Toonami Rewind on Adult Swim. I feel that I need to share another thought about that. At the time it was announced, some of my friends really thought at the time that it was created as a response to what MeTV Toons were doing. I discounted that back in May, and I'm REALLY discounting that now. If anything, MeTV Toons hasn't been much of a factor in anything CN/AS does as a whole. Not entirely. Granted, Cartoon Network has really gone a little deeper in the Hanna-Barbera library recently and added older Scooby-Doo shows to CN proper, Discovery Family had shows like The Smurfs and Jabberjaw (?) on its lineup, and Boomerang's general lineup is pretty diverse and solid.  Online, it's a different story. Cartoon Rewind, a Fire TV/Prime Video-exclusive FAST channel by WB TV, actually felt more like a pre-reaction to MeTV Toons than Toonami Rewind did since they do share some shows and an older demographic that Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, ...

Back in May, Adult Swim surprisingly returned the Toonami block to Friday afternoons/early-evenings with Toonami Rewind. It was a block dominated by Dragon Ball Z Kai (which was already on the Saturday block) and original Naruto but also marked the return of Sailor Moon to linear television for the first time in decades with the premiere of the Viz dubbed episodes, and fans were totally normal about the block's return and had no complaints about the lineup whatsoever. Of course, I'm lying. This IS Toonami, after all, and when it comes to that block, there will ALWAYS be complaints about it. It's been a tradition since 1997.  As I've mentioned back in May, Toonami Rewind was always an experimental block, so when it ended at the end of 2024 (which was literally a week ago by the time this article is published), there was little fanfare, and the world moved on. But in the grand tradition of the block, we, as fans, have to ask an age-old question.   Was Toonami Rewind a...

The following article was originally published as "Way Too Many Characters" on POST on December 12, 2022. -jh The following post is not a tweet. Yet. Words change meaning over time, and with the advent of the internet and the rise of social media, we have seen this happen rather quickly. There’s a generation that doesn’t immediately think of “a period of two weeks” when they hear the word “fortnight.” The word “woke” no longer means “not asleep” to a lot of people. It means either “being politically and socially aware, being alert and conscious to prejudice, discrimination, and systematic injustices in society, and the need to address them” or “EW! This thing has a woman, a minority, a progressive, an empathetic person, and/or a member of the LGBT in it or a part of it.” And a “tweet” used to mean “a small, sweet note made by a bird.” Short. Succinct. Sweet. That was the point of the small text messages by the users of the Twitter platform. Short, sweet, succinct messages. Or...

 It's 2025. Okay.  Look, 2024 has worn me out mentally, as I'm sure it has a lot of folks geopolitically, but you won't hear me talk about that on this site, mostly because I value my sanity. Instead, I talk about the media I enjoy, which has eroded my optimistic attitude bit by bit in the 25+ years I've been analyzing and covering it professionally. There has been a lot of progress made in that time, but over the past five years, there's been a major regression that has all but destroyed the landscape of the media industry as a whole.  Cable is all but a thing of the past. It's just so damned homogenized with very limited variety as the cable networks are trying to find audiences in a world dominated by streaming platforms (many of which are owned by the same companies that own the cable channels putting those companies in a real Ouroboros predicament). Vulture capitalists are ripping apart legacies that have been around longer than the CEOs of those companies ...