Thoughtnami™

Despite what the current Administration will tell you, February is still Black History Month in the United States.  Black history still matters.  Black stories matter.  And yes, Black lives matter. If you haven’t rolled your eyes and tuned out of this article after recoiling and seething at the thought of someone merely typing those three words let alone uttering it out loud, thank you for staying wide awake.  When I was a kid back in the 1980s, there weren’t many animated shows that had Black characters on it, and the ones that did had them as sidekicks to the main characters, barely making a peep, and largely in the background. Nearly everything else relied on the same, safe default White male lead.  While there’s nothing really wrong with that, sometimes, viewers want to identify with a character that comes from the same cultural background, and the first one that really did that for me was... *sighs*...   Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids .  Look,...

Today's my birthday.  I turned 47 today, and I'm still here to celebrate it. I still have my health (aside from the usual allergies and the occasional back pain, I wasn't too sick this past year). I still find myself writing, drawing, and creating things on a daily basis. If anything, this past year was one of my most creative periods in a long, long time.  I find myself constantly learning things about the world and still get inspired by it. And despite feeling a bit lost at times and dejected of the state of the world, especially in this country I still kind of tolerate (can't really say love because that's a pretty loaded word, and it's kind of hard to feel that way about a place that has people that wish you ill will because you were born a different color than than), I'm still here. I'm another year older, another year wiser, a bit more hardened, a bit humbled, and a lot more contemplative about life. I'm closer to 60 than I am 30, and I'm o...

  DISCLAIMER: The following is part four of a multipart alternate history series about the history of  Doctor Who  if it was an American-made production rather than a British production. It's purely speculative and a work of fiction, although some real-world elements were included and presented for realistic situations and scenarios. Neither this series nor its author are connected to nor reflect the views and opinions of BBC Studios (the owner of the  Doctor Who  franchise) or any entity or persons mentioned and does not mean to infringe on the copyrights and trademarks of those parties. - JH “There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them, this is an opportunity. Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point. The future revolves around you, here, now, so do good!” - The Doctor Since January 1982 , Universal had a strong co-producer of its Doctor Who...

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 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, and even MAX...

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 ...