Will Toonami survive without new Dragon Ball Content?

[WittyUsername]

To be blunt no. I’m pretty sure more people watched Dragon Ball Super on Crunchyroll or somewhere else online than watched it on Toonami. I haven’t had cable or watched broadcast television in yeeeeaaars.

You have a lot of casual people who still watch anime on TV. You still also have people that are dub only DB fans that will watch it dub on TV.

Yep. You might not feel like you know anyone who does this, but people who casually watch DB on TV aren't posting on message boards or Reddit or anything.

I’ve actually seen a couple of people on the DBZ subreddit that didn’t watch or hear about what happened in the Japanese version of Super, meaning they go into the Toonami broadcast completely blind.

[Cure Dragon 255]

I think people forget just how easy it is for any given Streaming Service to gain and lose the rights suddenly. Toonami for better or worse is on 99 million USA homes and its pretty much the safest bet without a Streaming Service to get your Dragon Ball Fix.

[ABED]

I think people forget just how easy it is for any given Streaming Service to gain and lose the rights suddenly. Toonami for better or worse is on 99 million USA homes and its pretty much the safest bet without a Streaming Service to get your Dragon Ball Fix.

Networks stop airing shows all the time and you have to watch at the times they set. Even when one service loses the rights, others will pick them up inevitably.

[KBABZ]

I think people forget just how easy it is for any given Streaming Service to gain and lose the rights suddenly. Toonami for better or worse is on 99 million USA homes and its pretty much the safest bet without a Streaming Service to get your Dragon Ball Fix.

Networks stop airing shows all the time and you have to watch at the times they set. Even when one service loses the rights, others will pick them up inevitably.

Keep in mind that DVRs exist, making it a middle ground between cable and streaming (the main difference being that on DVRs you can fast-forward through the ads).

[ABED]

I think people forget just how easy it is for any given Streaming Service to gain and lose the rights suddenly. Toonami for better or worse is on 99 million USA homes and its pretty much the safest bet without a Streaming Service to get your Dragon Ball Fix.

Networks stop airing shows all the time and you have to watch at the times they set. Even when one service loses the rights, others will pick them up inevitably.

Keep in mind that DVRs exist, making it a middle ground between cable and streaming (the main difference being that on DVRs you can fast-forward through the ads).

There's the cost, the scheduling, the fact that the episodes won't air in perpetuity, etc. You're WAY better off just streaming. I've never used FUNi's streaming service, but that's got to be a must better deal than cable.

[KBABZ]

Networks stop airing shows all the time and you have to watch at the times they set. Even when one service loses the rights, others will pick them up inevitably.

Keep in mind that DVRs exist, making it a middle ground between cable and streaming (the main difference being that on DVRs you can fast-forward through the ads).

There's the cost, the scheduling, the fact that the episodes won't air in perpetuity, etc. You're WAY better off just streaming. I've never used FUNi's streaming service, but that's got to be a must better deal than cable.

If you have an adult life, using a DVR to schedule a recording makes a lot of sense and isn't THAT much different from a streaming service.

[ABED]

I mean that you have to wait weeks for the episodes to air. I know how a DVR works. The economics of watching on cable are silly. It costs how much for a small cable package for a single month? Now compare that with a single month of FUNi's service which has the entire back catalog.

[KBABZ]

I mean that you have to wait weeks for the episodes to air. I know how a DVR works. The economics of watching on cable are silly. It costs how much for a small cable package for a single month? Now compare that with a single month of FUNi's service which has the entire back catalog.

With a cable package you're getting more than just that of course, like sports, all of CN and Nickelodeon, the news, and so on. My family in NZ doesn't use ANY streaming service outside of missed episodes.

[ABED]

I mean that you have to wait weeks for the episodes to air. I know how a DVR works. The economics of watching on cable are silly. It costs how much for a small cable package for a single month? Now compare that with a single month of FUNi's service which has the entire back catalog.

With a cable package you're getting more than just that of course, like sports, all of CN and Nickelodeon, the news, and so on. My family in NZ doesn't use ANY streaming service outside of missed episodes.

All of which you can get on a few streaming services like Hulu for a lot less, and you get entire back catalogs.

[Yuli Ban]

I mean that you have to wait weeks for the episodes to air. I know how a DVR works. The economics of watching on cable are silly. It costs how much for a small cable package for a single month? Now compare that with a single month of FUNi's service which has the entire back catalog.

With a cable package you're getting more than just that of course, like sports, all of CN and Nickelodeon, the news, and so on. My family in NZ doesn't use ANY streaming service outside of missed episodes.

As well as often dozens or hundreds of channels you will never watch.
I used to watch TV. At most, there were thirteen channels I regularly watched. Our package had 600. Most of them were throwaway shopping channels, religious channels, TV radio, or movie channels.
Even when I was 12, I was bemused by all this. Why have 600 channels if between my mother and I we'd only watch maybe 20 of them? Why purchase bundles that only had a number of certain channels when I was still only going to watch 2 out of maybe 10 of them? Oh, and let's not even bring up the ads. I grew up with ads. I remember buying stuff because of what I saw in ads. I still know the "beats" to certain TV blocks because of how the ads were set up (and how Cartoon Network differed from, say, Disney Channel). Many shows were also made around ads. Hell, many shows were ads. A show was 30 minutes long? Actually, it was 18 to 23 minutes long, and all the rest of that was a bunch of advertising. I remember MTV being the worst, where you'd get 3 or 4 minutes of some shitty reality show followed by 8 minutes of ads. You weren't paying to watch shows as much as you were paying to watch advertisements with TV shows and movies tucked in between.
The one thing I can't fault it for but has still become a limitation is how nothing was on demand either. Pop culture itself was completely at the whim of broadcaster schedules and TV Guide. For new material, that's fine. For reruns and syndication, that's frustrating. As we see in DBZ or any of the shonen and shojo anime coming over, try following an ongoing plotline where you need to see every single episode to understand what's going on. You can't just skip a few episodes. You wouldn't skip chapters in a book and seriously think you'll have a full understanding on the plot. It's one reason why Western cartoons were not allowed to have arcs longer than 2 or 3 parters for the longest time, as well as why sitcoms are so popular and "Status Quo is God" is such a big thing. People get frustrated if they have to keep up with every installment and don't have the time. At least in the past, it made sense why this was the case: recording shows for playback on demand requires storage space. Unless you had tapes or the broadcasting company had everything digitalized, that just wasn't possible before the 2000s. But the thing is, it's going on 2020 and technology has progressed. No, we're not going to "do it the old way" and suffer through waiting weeks just for the hope that a particular episode we want to watch will air once on a particular day. I grew up with that and hated it dearly even before it was possible for there to be another way besides buying overpriced VHSes (and then DVDs) that contained maybe a few episodes per season in a long-running show.

It was an extraordinarily unsustainable business model that only sustained itself because there was no alternative. Because how else were you going to watch these shows? Go down to the nickelodeon and watch some carnie turn the crank on a mechanical cinématographe?
Once internet bandwidth was large enough and internet packages were cheap enough, cordcutting was inevitable. Pick and choose what channels you want, get some adblock installed just in case, and voila. Of course, a lot of the online streaming services are falling into old sins— now you have to get Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime and YouTube TV and so on because some shows are exclusives. Still, it's better than before.

[ABED]

I wouldn't call them sins. I get that people want a one stop shop with everything for one low flat fee, but you don't have to buy every single one of them every single month. Even if people bought enough subscriptions to equal even the cheapest cable package, they'd still be getting a way better deal with streaming services.

As for everything else Yuli mentioned, while commercials can be obnoxious, they don't really bother me as a way of making money, nor did the other drawbacks because it was just how it was back then. We didn't know any other way. Now that we do, why would anyone want to go back to that time?

Also, it should be noted that watching the DVR only gets you the edited ENG version. You don't get it uncut, nor do you get the show in JPN.

[Dr. Casey]

Networks stop airing shows all the time and you have to watch at the times they set. Even when one service loses the rights, others will pick them up inevitably.

Yeah. If anything, I'd say that networks stop airing shows much more frequently than streaming services lose rights. Crunchyroll dropping series has been a fairly uncommon thing, a small handful of noteworthy exceptions aside. I think it would be very difficult to make an argument for traditional appointment TV being a match for streaming in any way, honestly, aside from a simple attachment to tradition. Reminds me a bit of how people tried to downplay the worth of the internet early on, like with Giles' preachy little self-righteous "I don't like this newfangled internet thing, books will always be better" monologue in season one of Buffy, or how the school librarians told us towards the very beginning of high school that the internet is unreliable and that we should always rely on the trusty old Card Catalog and library books instead.

[gokaiblue]

I'm seeing a kinda myopic view regarding Toonami. First off, I'm going to address the thing that really set me off.

So why is this stupid and long-since antiquated children's cartoon block still relevant to anyone at this stage beyond just raw "mental time travel" nostalgia? And how sad is it that anyone is THAT hung up on watching shitty cartoons as a child to the point that they fetishize - as grown-ass adults mind you - a fucking TV channel and a specific brand of bumpers/advertisements for it?

Cause this kind of shit right here?

This shouldn't exist. At all. And that it does is just baffling (and on some level, dispiriting) to no end

It means something to people. Nostalgia plays a huge part, sure, but to call it sad that people are fans of Toonami, to me, is kinda like people calling us sad for being fans of Dragon Ball. Sure, they're completely different franchises, but the fact still remains that it's a huge fandom based on primarily a children's entertainment franchise that was popular in the 80s and 90s yet somehow still manages to hold on today. And yes, it did make an impact, but I think a huge portion of us would he lying if we didn't acknowledge that on some level, our love for Dragon Ball could be considered as weird as the love someone has for Toonami.

My point is that (and I'm wasting into dangerous territory with this one) insulting a fanbase for loving what they love is not only elitist and rude but also slightly hypocritical. I could go on and on about the merits of Toonami and the community it brings just as all of us could go on and on about Dragon Ball. Sure, the latter has more meat on its bones and thus more to discuss, but that doesn't make it any more or less of a fandom than Toonami.

Also, I can definitely see the argument for questioning Toonami's existence in 2019. It is an anomaly in a streaming dominated industry, but it survives due to its community, not purely because of a show. That's something you can't always get with streaming. Sure, the simuldubs from Funimation and others help, but you don't get the experience of watching ot at the exact same time as others and interacting with other people as you watch the show. That's what Toonami, especially after the revival, has succeed in doing. Sure, anime does not need Toonami. Anime in the west won't die without Toonami, but it's still a key figure in distributing anime in addition to western action anime that might have previously been locked behind a paywall (a paywall cheaper than cable however).

For many Toonami fans such as myself, the block is viewed as an event, and I feel the packaging has helped. Had it just been a bunch of anime dumped into a slot without it, I think most people would just watch it once it came onto streaming services and binge it in this day and age. The fact that some people will rewatch shows simply because Toonami is airing then shows the brand's staying power.

Call it silly or antiquated if you want, but it's doing well enough for Turner to consider it a network priority, so it's definitely doing something right, which leads me to the topic at hand: Yes. Toonami will survive without Dragon Ball Super. We have the dub premiere for Demon Slayer coming up in addition to One Punch Man Season 2. Plus, I wouldn't be surprised if Toonami gets MHA S4 sooner than it got the show initially. In addition, the block will be airing a four part miniseries with Production I.G. in 2020.

Furthermore, the fact that the block itself has it's own universe (that's about to be shaken up soon might I add) with its own characters really helps it stand out. I doubt this would transfer well to a streaming solution, however, though a streaming companion to the block ala Jetstream or Reactor would work.

[ABED]

Not really the same thing. You're equating a programming block with the actual program. You have easy access to the program. It's like being nostalgic for VHS. Nothing wrong with having nostalgia, but it's a format that is long since dead for good reason.

That's something you can't always get with streaming

Not sure what you're getting at with this comment.

[MasenkoHA]

. It is an anomaly in a streaming dominated industry, but it survives due to its community, not purely because of a show. That's something you can't always get with streaming

Tons of shows that are released exclusively to streaming services have fan communities though?

. Sure, the simuldubs from Funimation and others help, but you don't get the experience of watching ot at the exact same time as others and interacting with other people as you watch the show.

Again, people watch shows on netflix and hulu together all the time.

[ABED]

I get it, things have changed. Appointment TV isn't really a thing anymore, but that mostly applies to first run programming and events like sports. DB is neither.

[MasenkoHA]

I get it, things have changed. Appointment TV isn't really a thing anymore, but that mostly applies to first run programming and events like sports. DB is neither.

Was it ever really? I think most people DVR’d and tivo’d shows to watch at their convenience before streaming took off and before that taped them.

[gokaiblue]

Not really the same thing. You're equating a programming block with the actual program. You have easy access to the program. It's like being nostalgic for VHS. Nothing wrong with having nostalgia, but it's a format that is long since dead for good reason.

That's something you can't always get with streaming

Not sure what you're getting at with this comment.

Perhaps because Toonami itself is a program and a programming block. It's not simply a collection of shows. Like I said, the block itself has its own lore and characters. We get just as excited to see a new promo and especially a new multipart event occurs (called Total Immersion Events) and something major occurs in the lore. To minimize Toonami to "just a programming block" is to ignore those elements that make it special and allow it to survive when the format itself is dying. Of course you don't see the appeal if you just look at it as a group of shows.

Nostalgia does play a part in the fandom, but it's far from the only reason why the Toonami fandom exists. I'm not sure I can explain it to someone who isn't part of the Toonami fandom why it has such an appeal, but I can assure you it's more than nostalgia. Case in point: I barely grew up with the block in its heyday. There's something special about the block and the way its packaged. It feels more like a special club than just a block of shows.

This is what creates the community around it, and in my very biased opinion, it's one that feels much more connected than the fandoms for each show. There isn't really a Crunchyroll fandom just as much as there isn't purely a Netflix fandom. They're services. All they are is a way to watch shows. Toonami, however, presents the shows and curates them while having its own mythos. The experience is what makes it special. With the streaming services, even with simuldubs, you're free to.watch it whenever you want. I wouldn't trade that for the world. However, with Toonami and linear television in general, you're watching it at the same time as everyone else. To add to this, with the advent of liverweeting allows fans to interact in near real time as the block airs. If your primary linear television experience was before this took off, then of course you don't understand. Toonami was already special with its host, its packaging, its music, and just the feel of it, but livetweeting adds another layer to it.

Tons of shows that are released exclusively to streaming services have fan communities though?

Not denying that, but it's a different type of community. Even in simulcasts, there's a wait time for discussion, as everyone watches the show when they can (unless you're one of those who watches it as soon as its uploaded).

Again, people watch shows on netflix and hulu together all the time.

And those are events organized by fans, friends and family. It's a shared experience, sure, but it's not as big of a shared experience that connects an entire fandom.

My entire point is that one doesn't have the right to say what should or shouldn't be a fandom. Let me ask you: Why do you like the things you do? What makes it special to you? Do you think that an outside source might find it weird that you're on a board discussing a franchise that is primarily aimed at children? Perhaps they might think its simply nostalgia? What makes Dragon Ball special?

Sound familiar? Just because you don't understand the appeal doesn't mean it has no appeal.

This is honestly a problem I see all across the board (myself included): we make assumptions about things based on only our own understandings, and if they differ from our perspective, we automatically think there's something wrong or that the perspective has no merit. We judge only on what we know, and when someone even suggests something that might differ from our view, we claim it either is invalid or question it. If I am wrong, please tell me, but I have seen and participated in these judgments. There are definitely some who exhibit this behavior more than others, however. This attitude can lead to fruitful discussions. After all, questioning ideas and their merit is at the heart of any discussion, but the way I've been seeing it here is mainly to shut ideas down or jump on people and claim they're wrong for thinking the way they do.

Sorry for the long winded post, but the whole view on Toonami expressed in this thread by several users kinda gave me an epiphany.

[Cure Dragon 255]

You guys may think Appointment TV is dead but the numbers say otherwise, Dragon Ball Super scored 800k viewers and was the 7th most watched thing on TV. But the BIG NUMBERS REALLY show up with Descendants which scored 4 FUCKING MILLION VIEWERS and the Steven Universe movie which also did gangbusters with 1.5 million. I know its shit put it sure does put a dent on the Appointment TV is dead and buried.

[gokaiblue]

You guys may think Appointment TV is dead but the numbers say otherwise, Dragon Ball Super scored 800k viewers and was the 7th most watched thing on TV. But the BIG NUMBERS REALLY show up with Descendants which scored 4 FUCKING MILLION VIEWERS and the Steven Universe movie which also did gangbusters with 1.5 million. I know its shit put it sure does put a dent on the Appointment TV is dead and buried.

Excellent point! Toonami adds another layer to appointment TV in my opinion, and it couldn't have come back at a better time: when livetweeting was starting to become a thing. So now, not only did we have the personality of TOM (the host) guiding us on the ship but could now communicate with the passengers in real time. Toonami already had a personal touch, and the livetweeting culture that helped revive it made it something to not be missed.