So Toonamai was a good thing.... I know that.... But thanks to it there are other places for anime on TV for kids these days....
From what I'm told, and maybe I'm wrong, when it comes to anime being broadcast on kids channels, Europe and Canada are light years ahead (or perhaps behind, depending on what is being broadcast) of the United States. I'm relying on information from 2008 right now, but... I highly doubt anything has changed. From the perspective of the United States, Fox Kids hasn't existed for half a decade, and its properties have been moved to Toon Disney's Jetix block, a channel that is slowly being phased into the 100's range. I'm not sure if Kids WB is dead and gone, but 4Kids projects in general are fading away. Surrogate programming for Toonami on Cartoon Network have faded away as well. Adult Swim looks like the only real source of recent anime left from its Wikipedia page, and it seems like they want most of it gone. ABC Family's broadcasts ceased to exist way back in 2004, but maybe that has changed now that Jetix has been moved over to Fox Kids. Straying from kids channels, Tech TV/Early G4's Anime Unleashed has also been gone for half a decade as well. The Sci-Fi channel alternates between having anime and not. Miscellaneous projects as seen from Fuse have all failed, too. As far as anime goes in the United States, it's either in backwater channel that exclusively shows re-runs from things originally broadcast waaaaay back in 2001-2003 or it's over something that had eclipsed anime and is known as a franchise. This is probably a large root between our problem between the value of Toonami here; European nations have quite a few things while the U.S. has very little of anything, especially anything recent.
Though the available stuff isn't as good....
Honestly, not everything that was on way back when was good. Toonami had Duel Masters, two different Zoids anime, Rave Master and a whole bunch of other miscellaneous garbage. Adult Swim had Super Milk Chan and Pilot Candidate, both of which were absolutely abysmal. Outside of Cartoon Network, Fox Kids had things like Shinzo, Medabots and Mon Colle Knights, while Kids WB had fu
cking Cubix, which is the lowest-rated complete show on MAL. Other channels that are less specifically towards kids like the Sci-Fi channel had a great wealth of some of the worst shows ever (Sci-Fi channel once had fu
cking Psychic Wars and MD Geist for Christ's sake, along with a million other terrible OVA's licensed during Central Park Media's/Manga UK's gore and po
rn heyday). Hell, quite a few bad things kinda work when you're a kid; the aforementioned Shinzo (or Mushrambo for the non-dub) and Mon Colle Knights were thoroughly mediocre and I still liked them when I was a kid. I can't say that any line-up today anywhere matches up with the best of Toonami's 1999-2002 programming, but I wouldn't white-wash all of the fail from yesteryear.
But that's just the times we're in.... So there's not much need for Toonamai.... It'd only be a brand now.... And if it did come back we'd hate it.... It wouldn't have any of the shows we loved on it.... It would be today's shows....There's no way it could be as influential as it was back then.... The best they could do with it is have a late night spot for the older crowd to nostalgia all over.... I guess that could work....
I'll actually admit that anime in the West was a phase for broadcasting that has passed on. Essentially, what remains of its legacy today are franchises like the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh, not individual anime. But honestly, when looking at a line-up comprised of nothing more than Naruto, Bleach and One Piece, that's good enough just a kick-start to a kid's career as an anime fan.
